African Voices Reshape French as Francophone Center of Gravity Shifts South

When Honorat Aziz first heard a young Parisian say I’m getting excited—a phrase meaning “I’m having fun” in the Ivorian slang Nouchi—he turned around expecting a compatriot. Instead, he found a Frenchman a decade ago. Today, as Aziz queues for a concert by Ivorian rapper Didi B in Paris, such expressions barely raise an eyebrow. Across France, grooming has replaced heartache for romantic disappointment, and la go stands in for the girl.

“It’s a way for everyone to speak with one another,” Aziz says.

This linguistic shift reflects a profound demographic reality. Of the estimated 396 million French speakers worldwide, 57% now live in Africa, according to the Observatory of the French Language. That marks a dramatic reversal from 2014, when Europe and Africa were nearly equal. As the Francophone population booms across the continent, the language’s centers of gravity are migrating from Paris to Abidjan, Algiers, and Yaoundé.

The Académie Française, the language’s traditional guardian, “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.

Yet this evolution has sparked tension. In France, debates rage over what—and who—counts as French. Across Francophone Africa and its diaspora, a deeper question persists: Can a language imposed by colonization ever become truly African?

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Students walk past a mural of Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara at Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, April 7, 2026. The Ivorian slang Nouchi has spread widely across France.

A Migration of Words

Before I’m getting excited and grooming came wesh and how how. While Nouchi captivates French youth today, Darija—an Arabic dialect from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—entered spoken French generations ago. During the world wars, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from West and North African colonies fought under the French flag. Their close quarters sparked a natural lexical exchange, particularly among North Africans, says Catherine Wihtol De Wenden, an immigration specialist at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Darija terms like how how (same difference), bled (countryside), and djebel (mountain) entered the French lexicon. Post-independence migration in the 1950s and 1960s brought more phrases. Today, wesh (what’s up) and how how are woven seamlessly into daily speech.

Later waves introduced Nouchi, Camfranglais—a blend of English, French, and Cameroonian tongues—and Congolese urban slang. France now hosts roughly 8 million immigrants, 49% born in Africa.

“Many people here don’t even realize these words come from Darija or Arabic originally, because they’ve become everyday French slang,” says Yanis, an Algerian resident without legal status who declined to give his surname. “It’s pretty cool.”

Esa Alexander/Reuters/File

Singer Aya Nakamura performs during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, July 26, 2024.

New Words, Old Debates

Terms like wesh now appear in Le Grand Robert dictionary’s 100,000 entries. But inclusion doesn’t equal acceptance. When President Emmanuel Macron proposed that Nakamura—born in Mali, raised in France—perform Édith Piaf’s songs at the 2024 Olympics, a public outcry erupted. Critics argued her lyrics, rich with onomatopoeia, Nouchi, and Malian Bambara, didn’t represent France.

Last September, a parents’ group in northern France protested after a middle-school teacher assigned a crossword featuring Arabic-origin words like wesh and chouia (a little bit) in French class.

“The French are very hesitant to accept new words,” says Jérémie Kouadio N’Guessan, an Abidjan-based linguist and founding scientific council member of the Dictionnaire des Francophones, a 2021 online dictionary celebrating French’s diversity. “But no language is pure.”

Observers say the controversy reveals unresolved tensions over France’s colonial past and its struggle to embrace second- and third-generation African immigrants.

“The problem is often not the word itself, but a type of rejection of different cultures mixing,” Ouadiabantou says. “The question becomes: What country does the person using the word belong to?”

“Should We Continue to Speak French?”

For Africans, questions of language and identity are equally fraught. French holds official status in 29 countries, most in Africa, and serves as a working language in several more. Yet many are reassessing ties to both their former colonizer and its imposed tongue.

Since 2022, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali—all under military rule—have expelled French troops, removed French as an official language, and in 2025 withdrew from the International Organization of La Francophonie.

Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, elected in 2024, broke precedent by delivering official speeches in both French and Wolof, the nation’s most widely spoken language. His administration pledged to expand local languages as mediums of instruction in schools long dominated by French.

In Côte d’Ivoire, French permeates both formal and daily life, and the government maintains friendly relations with Paris. Yet scholars question the linguistic legacy.

“The whole colonial model needs to be reassessed, starting with language and what we teach in school,” says Francis Akindès, a sociologist at Alassane Ouattara University in Abidjan. “Should we continue to speak French?”

Some see Nouchi as an answer. In a nation with over 60 languages, the French-based slang bridges divides, absorbing vocabulary from Baoulé, Dioula, Malinké, English, and Spanish.

Many Ivorians take pride in watching their slang cross into France—an irony not lost on them that the former colonizer now speaks a French they invented. Yet they insist the Nouchi heard in Paris will never fully replicate the original.

“Nouchi is a code, an expression, a full-body thing,” says El Matador, a musician in Abidjan. “Even if French people tried to reappropriate our language, they couldn’t use it like we do.”

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