The first time Honorat Aziz heard someone in France say je m’enjaille, he had just arrived in the country from his native Côte d’Ivoire. He turned around, expecting to see a fellow Ivorian, since the phrase, meaning “I’m having fun,” comes from an Ivorian slang called Nouchi. Instead, he saw a young Frenchman.
“I was definitely surprised,” he remembers.
But that was a decade ago. Today, as Mr. Aziz stands in line at a Paris concert for Ivorian rapper Didi B, Nouchi words and phrases no longer turn heads. In many parts of France, one is likely to hear goumin instead of chagrin d’amour to talk about heartache, and la go instead of la fille to refer to a girl.
Why We Wrote This
In the past decade, Africa has overtaken Europe as the region with the largest number of French speakers. But the transformation is not just geographic. The language itself reflects the continent’s growing influence.
“It’s a way for everyone to speak with one another,” says Mr. Aziz.
The influence of Ivorian slang – and North and West African dialects more broadly – on French is due in part to artists like Didi B and Franco-Malian singer Aya Nakamura, whose hit “Djadja” (“liar” in the Malian language Bambara) has over 1 billion views on YouTube.
It’s also sheer math. Of the estimated 396 million people who speak French around the world, 57% live on the African continent, according to recently released figures from the Observatory of the French Language. That’s a significant change from 2014, when the number of French speakers in Europe and Africa was nearly equal.
As the number of Francophones in Africa grows, the power centers of the language are also shifting. Decisions that were once made in Paris are now happening in Abidjan, Algiers, and Yaoundé.
The Académie Française, the French language authority, “is realizing more and more that the French language owes its vitality and survival to all these other languages and countries,” says Patrick Ouadiabantou, a linguist and research professor at Sciences Po Bordeaux.
Still, that new dynamic has created tensions. In France, the debate is about what – and who – is considered French. In Francophone Africa and its diaspora, meanwhile, the conversation centers on whether a language brought from Europe can ever be truly African.
A migration of words
Before there was je m’enjaille and goumin, there was wesh and kif kif.
While Ivorian Nouchi is popular among French youth today, Darija – an Arabic dialect from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia – made its way into spoken French decades ago.
During World War I and World War II, France recruited hundreds of thousands of soldiers from its West and North African colonies to fight under the French flag. The soldiers’ close proximity facilitated a natural exchange of words and expressions in French and African languages, especially among those from North Africa, says Catherine Wihtol De Wenden, a specialist on immigration at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
Soon, Darija words like kif kif (same difference), bled (countryside), and djebel (mountain) entered the French lexicon.
When Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia gained full independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of North Africans immigrated to France for its promise of economic opportunities. With them came more Darija phrases. Today, words like wesh (what’s up) and kif kif are now seamlessly integrated into everyday conversation.
Subsequent waves of African immigration have brought Nouchi, Camfranglais – a blend of English, French, and Cameroonian languages – and Congolese urban slang to France. Today, there are about 8 million immigrants living in France, 49% of whom were born in Africa.
“There are a lot of people here [in France] that don’t even realize the words come from Darija or Arabic originally, because they have become part of everyday French slang,” says Yanis, an Algerian living in France who declined to give his last name because he does not have legal residency. “It’s pretty cool.”
Esa Alexander/Reuters/File
New words, old debates
Today, foreign-origin terms like wesh can be found among the 100,000 words in the Le Grand Robert French dictionary. But that doesn’t mean they – or the people who brought them to France – are universally accepted.
In 2024, when French President Emmanuel Macron suggested Ms. Nakamura – who was born in Mali and came to France as a child – perform the songs of Edith Piaf at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, it caused a public outcry. Her critics said that the singer, whose lyrics frequently incorporate onomatopoeia, Nouchi, and Malian Bambara slang, did not represent France.
Meanwhile, last September, a parents group in the north of France spoke out publicly after a junior high school teacher assigned a crossword puzzle teaching Arabic-origin words like wesh and chouïa (a little bit) in a French class.
“The French are very hesitant to accept new words,” says Jérémie Kouadio N’Guessan, an Abidjan-based linguist and a founding scientific council member of the Dictionnaire des Francophones, an online dictionary created in 2021 to celebrate the diversity of the French language. “But no language is pure,” he says.
Some observers say the debate over foreign-origin words also reveals unresolved tensions over France’s colonial past and its ability to accept second- and third-generation African immigrants.
“The problem is often not the word itself, but a type of rejection of different cultures mixing,” says Mr. Ouadiabantou. “The question becomes, What country does the person using the word belong to?”
“Should we continue to speak French?”
For those living in Francophone Africa, questions about language and identity are not any easier.
French is an official language in 29 countries, the majority of which are in Africa, and it is the working language in several more. But in recent years, several of these countries have begun to reassess their relationship with both their former colonizer and the language it imposed on them.
Since 2022, several Francophone West African countries have demanded or negotiated the withdrawal of French troops stationed there. Among them were the military governments of Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, which also removed French as an official language and, in 2025, pulled out of the International Organization of La Francophonie.
Meanwhile, Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, elected in 2024, has broken with tradition by delivering his official speeches in both French and Wolof, the most widely spoken Senegalese language. His administration has also pledged to expand the use of local languages as the medium of instruction in schools, where French has historically dominated.
In Côte d’Ivoire, French is not only used in formal settings but is also the language of daily conversation. As opposed to some of its neighbors, its government has also maintained friendly relations with France. Yet some wonder about the country’s linguistic links to its colonial past.
“The whole colonial model needs to be reassessed, starting with language and what we teach in school,” says Francis Akindès, a sociologist on youth and democracy at the Alassane Ouattara University in Abidjan. “Should we continue to speak French?”
Some see Nouchi as one answer to that question.
In a country with more than 60 distinct languages, the French-based slang transcends linguistic divisions, absorbing words from major Ivorian languages like Baoulé, Dioula, and Malinké, as well as from English and Spanish.
For many Ivorians, watching their slang cross the border to France is a source of pride. Some note the irony that people from the country that once colonized Côte d’Ivoire are now speaking a version of French that Ivorians invented. But Ivorians also say the Nouchi used in France will never quite be the same.
“Nouchi is a code, an expression, a full-body thing,” says El Matador, an Abidjan-based musical artist. “Even if French people tried to reappropriate our language, they couldn’t use it like we do.”
Audrey Thibert contributed reporting from Boston.