Violence de la jeunesse/violence sur la jeunesse : regards croisés sur la perception de la violence langagière de populations scolaires issues de l’immigration

Youngster violence/violence on youngsters. Crossed views on the perception of verbal violence among immigrant school populations Among the different forms of violence, from and addressed to the youth, those exerted within the school framework are many and various. The form that has more particularly caught our attention, is the so-called normative violence connected to the language practices among immigrant school populations.Treating the issue of violence in relation to the norm, whether it be of a linguistic kind or another, is legitimate as far as the former constitutes and destroys the latter. Indeed, the school presents itself as « the place favouring a struggle to impose linguistic norms ». The way of speaking of school actors – a.o. learners and teachers – is an indicator of the relationship that the latter have with social rules in general and school norms in particular. Beyond the description of obscenities, language coarseness and vulgarity of the former, and of the French language « in the manner of Charles-Henri » of the others, these forms of verbal violence in the school framework are worth thinking about.Moreover, the social imagery related to immigration is so virulent that the equation « practice of languages different from "correct" French (the so-called "bon usage"), immigration and delinquency » may seem astonishing to some while it is admitted by others. The practice of the language would explain acts of delinquency: to act on the language would be preventive. « Young immigrants had better behave themselves », or even « they’d better talk correctly »! The eradication of violence seems to be at the cost of this simple solution.It is precisely beyond this naive optimism that we would like to go in this article, centred on the notion of youngster verbal violence, in the way it is perceived and lived in the school framework. To do so, the contribution of sociolinguistics can help in order to delimit and redefine language practices and to supply didactics of French with useful marks for efficient school norm teaching