View on the Updating of Nouchi Lexicon and Expressions

The emergence of mixed urban languages during the past few decades in Africa results in sociolinguistic reflections of great interests. Urban multilingualism linked to "super- diversity" all over the world (Blommaert & Rampton 2011) is a preferred field of sociolinguistics, combined with formal researches on language contact. However, African urban languages differ from those of the West by their more radical differentiation from their underlying languages (Mous 2009). This progressive autonomy tends to reduce, in Africa, more than elsewhere, the impact of super- diversity on communication, while a new urban identity is emerging, with its new modes of communication, which are not without aftereffect on the rest of the country. In this paper, we are interested in Nouchi (Côte d’Ivoire) and particularly in the updating process of its lexicon. Discovered towards the 70s, Nouchi was, originally, a coded language created by the Susu (Guinea ethnic group). Quickly perceived as an argot spoken by the young drop-outs (Kouadio 1990), as a "youth language" (Soft & Kießling 2004 Auzanneau & Juillard 2012), it has become, nowadays, an urban language used across all social groups. Formally, words and expressions in Nouchi are created and renewed at exponential speed. The formal processes include derivation, improper derivation, compounding, clippings, and borrowings. But far from being simply mechanical and fun, the linguistic manipulations are imbued with the socio-cultural context and echo with it. The emergence of Nouchi in a spectacular way in Côte d’Ivoire is obviously due to the favorable sociolinguistic circumstances therein (Boutin & Kouadio 2015). The renewal of Nouchi lexicon is influenced by the national and international current events affecting the various stylistic devices: antiphrasis, euphemism, metonymy, and metaphor. Through the study of these innovations strategies, and also along with the invariant structures, we shall show the growing autonomy of Nouchi in the Ivorian urban context, and we shall give an overview of the use of Nouchi in media and professional communication, in order to confirm its social significance