Verbal tics can puzzle learners of French

Learning French requires listening closely to native speakers so that you can repeat what you hear. However, there are some habits you should not acquire. 

Just as in English, lazy thinkers insert verbal tics (tics de langage) into their utterances, which are really just sounds for the sake of filling silence. 

You will hear these involuntary, unconscious expressions used widely, and at first you may be tempted to look them up in a dictionary. 

Eventually, you will realise that they do not mean anything; they do not add to the delivery of information or the exchange of ideas; and they are not grammatically necessary. 

They serve as pointless fillers, impromptu punctuation markers or pauses while the speaker’s thoughts catch up with them. Be wise: you can, and should, do without them. 

 As with all things, tics go in fashions. In 2007, Charles Timoney, author of the charming miscellany Pardon my French, noted: 

“The single word without which young people would go into spasm each time they tried to say anything is quoi. This means ‘what’, but is generally tacked on to the end of a more-or-less coherent sentence to show that they have got to the end of it, such as it is, and that it is probably your go now.” 

You still hear the interrogative quoi used – or rather, misused – by some people as a verbal spasm (c’est difficile, quoi for ‘it’s difficult’). 

However, in the last few years it has given ground to another tic that has become the favourite of youngsters: du coup.

Du coup literally means ‘suddenly’ or ‘all of a sudden’, but it came to be used in the sense of ‘so’, ‘thus’, ‘hence’, ‘as a result of’, or ‘consequently’ (j’ai raté mon train, du coup j’ai pris un café for ‘I missed my train so I had a coffee’). 

However, you will mostly hear it in situations where it means nothing at all. It is deployed as a way to avoid a pause when the speaker is in the heat of telling a story. 

It has been elegantly described as an aural comma, used in the same way as ‘like’ in English. You will also hear people use it at the very beginning of a story, a sentence or a conversation, as a means of opening speech. 

Another ubiquitous tic is tu vois (or vous voyez in the formal register) for ‘you know’. 

It is not quite an affirmation and not quite a question, but it sounds as if it is seeking the collusion of the interlocutor. An example is C’était super gênant, tu vois? (‘It was super embarrassing, you know?’).

Other tics do mean something but they are overused. Voilà is a very useful word when used correctly (to mean ‘there you are’), but it is often repurposed as another punctuation sound.

You may hear it in conjunction with quoi to make the emphatic voilà, quoi, as well as in the construction et puis voilà, which, in the mouth of a laconic adolescent, usually means: ‘That’s all I have to say about that’.

Similarly, en fait is a decent enough expression that means ‘in fact’ or ‘actually’. However, when dropped into every other sentence it becomes devoid of meaning. 

In utterances such as En fait, je voulais dire que… (‘Actually, I meant that…’) and En fait, ce n’est pas ça (‘Actually, that’s not it’), it fails to help the listener distinguish fact from fiction.

And so it goes on. As you become more fluent in French you will probably find the proliferation of tics painful to listen to. They can easily get in the way of communication instead of facilitating it, which is the true purpose of language.