“Jane Birkin did not care about linguistic norms which are social norms” – Liberation

2023-07-16 18:44:21

Sociolinguist Philippe Blanchet analyzes the British accent and the inventive neologisms of the actress and singer, who died on Sunday July 16.

Beyond her art of narrating her daily life as a whimsical and fantastic adventure, Jane Birkin, and this is not the least of her attractions, never really lost her English accent when she spoke French. A rather transgressive and enjoyable wind of freedom for this pioneer in the mixing of languages. The writer Olivier Rolin, who was his companion, spoke of the “Creole” of Jane Birkin, “of a Frenchman who comes out of his hinges”. A sociolinguist in a research laboratory at Rennes-2, Philippe Blanchet studies languages ​​and places them in their social context. He analyzes for Liberation the funny language of Jane Birkin.

For more than fifty years, Jane Birkin has retained her British accent. But that was never a problem. For what ?

Jane Birkin spoke French with an English accent. This is very rarely a problem when your language characteristics come from a dominant language, such as English. Jane Birkin was on the side of those we accept, that we do not reject, even that we find charming. She would have had an Arabic or Wolof accent, maybe she should have ended up changing her pronunciation. The era, the cultural and social context also played a role. Jane Birkin arrived in France at the end of the 1960s and her career has long been associated with that of Serge Gainsbourg, an artist identified for his lack of respect for standards. Transgressing with his British accent and even in his way of speaking French could be considered secondary to the transgressions made by Serge Gainsbourg in his song texts with puns of a sexual nature that mixed French and English. Last but not least, Jane Birkin landed in the 70s, at a time when social norms were being questioned with the hippies, May 68. She arrived and said: I don’t care, I don’t respect linguistic norms which are social norms. As time goes by, if she hasn’t changed her accent, it’s because she didn’t need it and it became part of her artistic identity.

His way of misrepresenting words was also showing freedom from the norm?

It’s a spontaneous trend among English speakers, because except for humans and some animals, things don’t have a gender in their language. They therefore tend spontaneously to assign gender randomly. Why window is feminine and wall masculine in French? It’s completely arbitrary.

And his funny neologisms?

I don’t know if it was deliberate with her, but it corresponds to a fairly widespread practice among multilinguals: passing words from one language to another when you consider that they are more adequate to designate a thing. Importing or inventing words makes purists and curmudgeons scream. But for bilinguals or multilinguals, it’s quite commonplace. Whether it is spontaneous or voluntary with Jane Birkin is secondary. She didn’t care and could care less because English is a prestigious language.