The Sounds of Paris: Overheard in a Taxi

The Sounds of Paris: Overheard in a Taxi

One of my first impressions of Paris came before I had walked along the Seine, seen the Eiffel Tower, or sat at a sidewalk café.

It came from the front seat of a taxi.

After arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I climbed into a cab for the drive to my hotel. As the landscape outside the window gradually changed from airport highways to the streets and neighborhoods of Paris, my driver carried on a conversation.

I couldn’t understand it, but I was intrigued by the rhythm of what I was hearing. Every so often, a French phrase would emerge clearly from a conversation that otherwise sounded completely unfamiliar to me.

So I recorded a small portion of it.

Later, I learned that the conversation appears to have been primarily in Wolof, interspersed with French.

Wolof is a language spoken principally in Senegal and also in neighboring West African countries. Its presence in a Paris taxi is not particularly surprising. France and Senegal have a long and complicated historical relationship, and today France is home to a substantial Senegalese and broader West African community.

Suddenly, this little recording from my taxi ride seemed to capture something much larger about Paris.

A Conversation Between Languages

The recording is difficult to decipher because of the road noise, the distance from the driver, and the low volume. Much of the Wolof cannot be transcribed confidently, and there isn’t enough audible material to determine what the conversation was actually about.

But scattered through it are recognizable pieces of French:

“Alors…”

“C’est comme un gars… mais c’est vrai.”

“…comme là, quoi, nous, on est ici.”

“Nous, on est ici deux fois.”

“C’est intéressant aussi, maintenant…”

“…ça me plaît…”

“C’est pas vrai…”

In English, those fragments amount to something like:

“So…”

“It’s like a guy… but it’s true.”

“…like here, you know, we are here.”

“We have been here twice.”

“It is interesting too—now it is interesting as well.”

“…I like it…”

“That’s not true…”

They don’t tell us the story of the conversation.

But perhaps that isn’t the interesting part.

The interesting part is how naturally the driver moved between languages.

Paris Is More Than French

When we imagine Paris from afar, we tend to give it a very particular soundtrack.

We imagine French.

We imagine bonjour and merci, conversations drifting from cafés, waiters calling across terraces, announcements in the Métro, and that unmistakable cadence of the French language.

But the real soundtrack of Paris is considerably more complicated.

This is a global city shaped by generations of migration. People have arrived here from Europe, North and West Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean, and virtually every other corner of the world. They brought their food, traditions, religions, music—and their languages.

Sometimes those languages remain distinct.

Sometimes they intermingle.

And sometimes, as I discovered during my very first taxi ride into Paris, two languages can comfortably inhabit the same conversation.

My driver wasn’t giving a demonstration of multicultural Paris. He wasn’t explaining anything to a visitor.

He was simply talking.

That is precisely what made the moment so interesting.

Listening to a City

There is a tendency when traveling to concentrate on the things we are supposed to see.

The monuments.

The museums.

The architecture.

The famous streets.

The photographs everyone takes.

But cities reveal themselves in much smaller ways, too.

They reveal themselves through the people riding the Métro beside you, the families walking through neighborhoods, the conversations at the next café table, the shopkeepers greeting customers—and a taxi driver speaking Wolof and French as he carries a newly arrived traveler from Charles de Gaulle into Paris.

I had barely begun my visit.

I was still sitting in the taxi with my luggage beside me, watching Paris approach through the window.

And already the city was telling me something about itself.

I just had to listen.