Reduplication for Emphasis

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kimber Miller. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Kimber.

Hiya, Kimber. Welcome to the program.

I’m great. Thanks. Thanks. I’m excited to be here.

I’m calling to ask about a verbal habit I noticed where I grew up in South Louisiana. I’ve since moved away, and it’s the only place that I’ve ever heard of having this habit of the use of repetition for emphasis, and an example would be, well, it’s hot, but it’s not hot, hot. And that is for anything you could possibly imagine.

And I want to know, because linguistically, Cajun French is a very isolated dialect, and it certainly has morphed into Cajun English more than French because the language has just about died out. And I’m very curious, is it related to the medieval French that’s close to, you know, the roots of that language? Is it just a verbal habit?

This has a name, and we can tell you a little bit about this. I think this will get you excited. And we can refer you to some places online where you can read more about this in specific in French and in Louisiana Creole French.

Oh, cool.

She is excited.

All right.

Yeah, yeah.

I knew she would be.

I’m going to bring you lots of language love here, Kimber. But the short story is this is called reduplication. When you reduplicate, you repeat either a word or a part of a word in order to add some semantic value to it, meaning, well, meaning you could be adding meaning, or you could be emphasizing it, or you could somehow bring it into relief or even change the meaning just a little bit.

English does this on its own. It doesn’t need French. French does this on its own. And I’m not surprised to find that it’s predominant in Louisiana Creole, because it’s definitely one of those things that happens in colloquial language or in less formal language or in the language of people speaking to their children. And frankly, it happens in almost every language that’s been tracked. And it’s particularly common in Polynesian languages or Austronesian languages.

So in any case, to go back to the French, the French do this. Albert Waldman has a couple of sections about it in his book, French and Creole in Louisiana. And one of the things that he talks about there is that this appears in the language of children. And yet it seems to be used in a knowing way, in a way that adds, it doesn’t add meaning, but it just drops the register.

For example, you probably know dodo means to sleep, right?

Right.

Okay.

You go dodo or something.

You say dodo, yeah.

You say dodo.

So it comes from the French word dormir. Now, the thing is you can just say the normal word for sleep or you can say dodo. And it still means basically the same thing, but it means it in a gentler, softer way.

But there’s another person that I should refer you to, and her name is, hold on a second here, Mary Ellen Scullin. And she has a couple chapters about this in a book which has a section called New Insights into French Reduplication. And she has a ton of forms here where people take the word elephant, and they call it fen-fen. Or they take a spider, which is arigne, and they do n’igne. And these are so common in French that it’s almost a sport to reduplicate a word, to create a sex report.

I’m going to link to a ton of stuff online about this. There’s just so much beautiful material there and some studies that have been done. And the best thing, of course, is the list of the reduplicated words, the child language or even the adult language. It’s great. It’s fun.

Well, this has been so much fun.

All right. Thanks for calling, Kimber.

Thanks, Kimber.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Well, speaking of reduplication, we’d be really, really, really, really, really glad to hear from you. The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.