ABSTRACT
This chapter first describes the historical and sociological situations in which urban contact vernaculars emerged on the outskirts of French cities, and particularly Paris, from the 19th century onwards. After reviewing the data available for studying spoken French and presenting a corpus of young speakers collected in and around Paris in a range of multicultural surroundings, this chapter goes on to look at several possibly emergent phenomena. Innovations are mainly limited to the lexicon, with items borrowed in particular from Arabic, and to some extent to prosody. Very few grammatical features appear to be contact-related. Among the sociolinguistic findings, the study explores phenomena which could indicate the emergence of a Contemporary Urban Vernacular.
