The diatopic journey of the word wesh, impact and evolution in the French language

Abstract

This study analyzes the integration of the Arabic dialectal loan wesh into the French language and the language habits of the French. Through the suburban language commonly defined as "slang" and hip hop culture, particularly rap, this borrowing has undergone several important semantic shifts and numerous graphic variants. The various definitions of this term in the Petit Robert 2023 (paper version) and the Wiktionnaire (online), as well as statistical research in Internet corpora, reveal evolutions, linguistic variations and trends generated essentially by sociolinguistic functions.

Keywords

• wesh
• borrowing
• syntactic positions
• semantics
• writing