Beuverie express, biture express or alcool défonce: how to Speak about binge drinking and Alcohol use in French

Abstract

Binge drinking is a phenomenon of excessive alcohol use that is becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide, mainly among young people. The purpose of binge drinking, already known officially as beuverie express in French, is to get drunk and feel the effects of alcohol in a very short period of time. On the basis of a corpus composed of blogs, online press articles and forum discussions, our article aims at analysing how Internet users name this phenomenon in French and how they speak about the various aspects of the given semantic field (excessive alcohol drinking, types of drinks, drunkenness, etc.). Our study found that this semantic field, also known as an important topic of argotology, is particularly favourable for the use of slang, a high number of expressions are employed by Internet users to speak about the phenomenon of binge drinking and that of alcohol use in general in colloquial/slang French.