« Je suis partout » donc « J’existe ». La francophonie visuelle à Naples

Nowadays, in Naples, a city once closely linked to France and to the French language, French and Francophony are becoming more and more ‘visible’, but their path is far from defined. The visual presence of French in Naples’s public spaces is a symptomatic index of the traditional (elegance, finesse, universality) and contemporary socio-symbolic values associated with this language. The current era ctually seems to be introducing new representations, probably also because of the Maghrebian and Sub-Saharan immigration which, in recent years, has changed and complicated the linguistic landscape of the city. There are some local shops whose signs, using the stereotype of French elegance, testify to a lexico-semantic and syntactic neology in which Italian and French sometimes mingle in an original way. This Francophony bearing a commercial vocation is reinforced by a more odological and marginal Francophony, composed of public notice boards, posters, but mainly of graffitis. The article presents a number of tags and graffitis which can be perceived as French words for their writing. Moreover, there are wall statements written entirely in French or that mix French, Italian, and Neapolitan. The corpus collected is provisional; however, it is able to show the emergence of exposed writings in French language whose analysis arouses interest as a signal revealing the presence of French-speaking immigrants and new dynamics of diffusion of Francophony.