argot

At the start of the Great War, millions of men were gathered together to fight France's enemies. One of the difficulty for the Army and the officers was that many Frenchmen actually did not speak French properly but spoke their own local dialects. After months spent together in the fields and trenches of World War One, soldiers created their own “ trench slang “ ( “ l'argot des tranchées “ ), mixing words from popular French, Parisian slang, languages of the colonial soldiers and other popular dialects. (more…)