Abstract
In each and every culture, the popular language is a privileged linguistic field of création as far as insults are concemed. The popular French of Ivory Coast ("nouchi") is no exception and the stock of insults are renewed by a permanent dynamics in urban communication, where quarrels are fréquent and where nouchi is vividly in use. The practice of verbal insuit in the Ivory Coast urban context is presented and set within the larger perspective of (Socio)Linguistics (/.e. Labov, Lagorgette, Ruwet). The mechanisms of this continuous création (lexical items, périphrases used as direct vocative insults) are then established. Insistence is placed on linguistic processes (borrowing from local languages; lexical hybridisation or paraphrase between French and local languages; reactivation or reanalysis of French idioms) as well as stylistic and rhetorical processes (formulaic speech figures, motivation by the immediate environment of the metaphoric création: news, manufactured products, TV soaps, etc.). This is followed by a consideration of the main themes of the corpus and of their contextual meaning. Finally, hypotheses are formulated on the reasons for the dominance of certain themes in the urban, popular community of Ivory Coast.
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