Fictive Norms Essay

Fictive Norms

Before describing in details the various components of the fictive norms, it is interesting to specify that any affective, historical, and aesthetic attitude exists in a continuum ranging from positive to negative; for instance, comments connecting Walloon to rural life can be positive when rurality is constructed within a pastoral perspective of land as a place of authenticity and simplicity as opposed to the decadence of the city, but rurality becomes negative when it is linked with backwardness, the lack of modernity or education.

Keeping the importance of continuum in mind, it is now possible to explore further the fictive evaluations collected on social networks. One can identify five main areas where normative fictionality

The most common example of social stigma being comments including the word “baraki” (with various spellings) such as (1) “vrai baraki carmes”, (2) “Baraqui de belge”, (3) “l’est bin Arindjî c’barakî d’kermesse” or simply (4) “barlou”. In Wallonia, this word is the Belgian French equivalent of redneck from the United States or chav from the United Kingdom. Traditionally, the figure of the baraki relates to bad manners, poor education and by extension social class. If the regular occurrence of baraki is unconvincing, let us consider a sample of other terms mentioned by users to describe the language or the speaker: “barloss” or “boloss” not quite distant from baraki, more compelling instance to illustrate the lower social class connotation are “cas social” or “K sos” which refers directly to someone’s socio-economic status.
Despite abundant occurrences, the theme of social class offers little to examine as there is little variation in the expressions and the association is rather straightforward. It might be worth pointing out comment (3), which reminds us of comment (5) in the previous section. Indeed, the user also writes in Walloon, and here the person is well aware that the negatively connoted term barakî is from Walloon origin. The nature of the corpus prevents us from gaining a deeper understanding, yet once again we witness a survival of Walloon in swear