Arabic lessons in Paris: Arab language, food, music, books can be found influencing French city

Paris is often associated with a single language — the romantic melody of French that echoes through its cafes, bookstores and cobbled streets. But as a cosmopolitan capital city, it’s home to many more, and one in particular has helped shape the way Parisians speak, think and connect.

Arabic is France’s second-most-spoken language, with roughly 4 million speakers. From cafe terraces to music, art and food, its influence is woven into the fabric of Parisian life.

As someone who moved to Paris to learn French, I’ve been intrigued by how many Arabic words have made their way into everyday speech. Expressions like wesh (what’s up?), kiffer (to like) and bled (village, hometown) are borrowed from North African dialects and adopted into the city’s vibrant slang.

Last year, curious about its role in French culture, I signed up for Arabic lessons. Aside from a basic notion of literary Arabic, they gave me an insight into how it has been influencing French for centuries, giving us words like pasteque (watermelon), magasin (shop) and jupe (skirt). Paris has also attracted Arab intellectuals, artists, students and writers who contribute to its cultural and linguistic fabric.

Yet visible traces of this influence are scattered and often overshadowed by dominant narratives of French identity. The French Constitution states that “the language of the Republic is French”, and discussions around the place of Arabic in society are often highly politicised.

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“Generally, the Arabic language is perceived negatively by a large part of the French population,” said French Lebanese journalist Nabil Wakim, author of Arabic For Everyone: Why My Language Is Taboo In France.

In recent years, however, a growing number of voices — from writers to historians and cultural figures — have been celebrating the history of the Arabic language and culture in the French capital and beyond.

On a recent afternoon, Chez Baya, a Tunisian restaurant in the 11th arrondissement, flows with the smell of freshly baked mlawi (flatbread) and ojja (eggs poached in a tomato and pepper sauce).

Kamel Faleh, the owner, tries not to speak in his mother tongue in front of his French-speaking customers — “so as not to annoy them,” he says. But some are very interested in learning Arabic — his restaurant sits across the street from my language school, and students often drop by after class in the evenings and on the weekends.

Faleh says that when he first arrived in France, he didn’t speak French and had to learn it. “It’s nice to see people adapting to us as well,” he says. “They pick up words from our dialect, like chwoya, which means ‘a little bit’.”

Arabic has been taught in Paris at least since the creation of the College de France, one of France’s most prestigious research institutions, in 1530 — which means that Arabic was taught in France even before French was, says Tarek Abouelgamal, a linguist and the educational co-ordinator of the language school at Paris’ Arab World Institute.

The institute, which opened in 1987 in a contemporary building on the Left Bank, is dedicated to preserving and promoting Arabic language and culture. Its library hosts weekly poetry readings, and its museum hosts a vibrant line-up of exhibitions.

The Arab World Institute’s position in the Latin Quarter acknowledges the longstanding relationship between the city’s Arab population and this iconic Parisian neighbourhood, where the Grand Mosque of Paris was built in the 1920s. Over the summer, the museum hosts walking tours that explore this little-known part of its history.

Home to the Sorbonne University, the Latin Quarter is the symbolic birthplace of the cafe as a place where intellectuals converged to debate and exchange ideas. The introduction of coffee can be traced back to the mid-17th century with the arrival of Ottoman ambassador Soliman Aga, who dazzled Parisian high society with lavish “coffee ceremonies” and contributed to the opening of the first French coffee shops, including Le Procope, a cafe on many travellers’ itineraries.

In the interwar period, the neighbourhood welcomed the city’s growing North African population, and many of its cafe-hotels, run by Algerians, became cultural hubs where music was shared and ideas about colonialism, independence and identity were fiercely debated.

Students and politicians from Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria gathered at Le Cafe du Metro on Boulevard Saint-Germain, a short walk from where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre discussed philosophy at the Cafe de Flore.

“The Latin Quarter is known all over the world for its cafes, but what’s interesting is that a neighbourhood that is so symbolic of 20th-century Paris is also very symbolic of Arab culture in the city,” says Coline Houssais, the author of Paris In Arab Letters, which explores the relationship between Arab writers and the City of Light.

Among the Sorbonne’s famous alumni are some of the most notable figures in Arabic literature, including Egyptian authors Mohammed Hussein Heikal, whose 1913 novel Zeinab is considered by many scholars to be the first Arabic novel, and Taha Hussein, who was nicknamed the Dean of Arabic Literature, and playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim, who spent much of his student years frequenting theatres and the Paris Opera.

“Paris is full of the top names in Arabic literature and continues to have strong ties with the Arab world,” says Caterina Detti, when we meet one morning at her bookshop, Maktaba Berfin, one of a few in the city dedicated solely to Arabic-language books.

Since opening in the 18th arrondissement a few years ago, it’s become a cultural hub hosting poetry events, writing workshops and live music. Shelves are stacked with everything from ancient grammar books to Naguib Mahfouz novels and translations of Joan Didion’s essay collections.

A 20-minute walk south from Maktaba Berfin is Barbes, a neighbourhood at the foot of Montmartre that pulses with the legacy of Arab music in Paris.

The elevated metro line shadows streets once bustling with record shops and cafes where, throughout the 20th century, musicians from North Africa came together to play, record and listen to songs of exile.

“This all used to be record stores,” says Meziane Azaiche, the Algerian founder of Le Cabaret Sauvage, a concert venue in the 19th arrondissement, as we walk down the Boulevard de la Chapelle on a recent afternoon.

Most of the stores faded with the rise of digital music — except for one. Next to Barbes Rochechouart metro station, Sauviat Musique’s unassuming shop front, sandwiched between a Foot Locker and a halal restaurant, still displays a selection of CDs.

The shop has been in business for nearly a century. Its founder, a woman from Auvergne called Lea Sauviat, saw an opportunity and swapped her classical music catalogue for music from the Maghreb, the western part of North Africa along the Mediterranean, helping propel the neighbourhood into a cultural hub as early as the 1940s.

“Artists from the Maghreb were often recorded by European labels, and Barbes became the European capital of Arab music,” says Hajer Ben Boubaker, a historian who recently published the book Barbes Blues: A Popular History Of Maghrebi Immigration, which traces the neighbourhood’s political and cultural history.

Barbes is also an important hub for a popular genre of Algerian folk music called rai, according to Azaiche, who also created the musical shows Barbes Cafe and The Women Of Rai. The genre found refuge here when it was banned in its home country, and artists like Cheikha Rimitti, who helped it reach an international audience with her defiant songs of freedom, lived nearby and played at local cabarets. Rimitti played one of her last shows at the Cabaret Sauvage before she died in 2006.

For years after the Islamist terrorist attacks in November 2015, Arabic music disappeared from radio stations, television and festival headlines, Azaiche says. “But now I think it’s coming back.”

On our walk, we pay a visit to the leafy square named after Rimitti in 2021 — and where a new landmark was recently unveiled. On the ground around a tree, lyrics of her song Nouar have been inscribed in French and Arabic in gold letters. It’s one of the few visual reminders of the neighbourhood’s rich cultural history.

“Arabic is a language of France,” says Houssais, the author. “Though its roots lie elsewhere, I, like many others, fell in love with it in Paris.”