Nouchi as a Distinct Language: The Morphological Evidence

In this paper I argue that Nouchi, a relatively young Ivoirian contact variety, is and should be treated as a full-fledged language distinct from French and its other source languages. Nouchi, an emerging language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire since that late 1970’s (Ayewa 2005), has been treated in the literature as a slang vocabulary or an urban youth dialect of French. Though Nouchi began as a lingua franca among uneducated youth in urban centers, it is now the preferred language of Ivoirians in Abidjan and the surrounding areas of Côte d’Ivoire (Kube-Barth 2009). This paper focuses on morphological properties of Nouchi, which demonstrate that Nouchi is a full-fledged language with a grammar distinct from its source languages. I begin in section two with a brief description of Nouchi’s socio-historic development. In section three I describe how Nouchi has been perceived since its emergence in the 1970’s, both within Côte d’Ivoire, and in the literature. Section four details morphological processes in Nouchi, demonstrating contra Ahua (2009) that Nouchi’s morphology is not transparently borrowed from French. These nonFrench properties include 1) derivational suffixes, both those borrowed from other source languages, and those original to Nouchi, 2) lexical tone on all words in the Nouchi lexicon including monosyllabic ones, and 3) productive grammatical tone. In section five, I discuss the implications of Nouchi’s productive morphological processes, claiming based on empirical evidence that Nouchi is distinct from Ivoirian French and that it should be treated as such.