How does containment update the importance of speaking?

• Since Tuesday, France is confined, creating significant gaps in the social life of its inhabitants.
• Among them, and this was perhaps not the most predictable, the absence of oral conversation is felt among people confined alone.
• If tricks have been put in place, in particular the famous Skyp'apéros, we will explain to you why the oral is so important in our societies.

Listening to Emmanuel Macron, it will be understood, the nation is at war against the coronavirus. An invisible but also terribly silent war. Not that we would have liked to hear the sound of the bombs or the tearing of shells, but it must be admitted, a little noise would not hurt in some of our apartments confined to silence.
It is perhaps even what we miss most of life "before", the sound of our loved ones, much more than physical contact, bars, outings, fresh grass and football. Take it all away for months, we will keep it, but give us back the irresistible voice of our girlfriend, the fat laugh of our bestah, the jokes of friends and all the oral conversations of everyday life. Except for the applause at 8 p.m. and the birds returning to sing on our balconies, it is flat calm, and there is no need for infinite spaces like Pascal for the silence to frighten us.

Beneficial convention

To see the multiplication of calls and Skype since the beginning of this confinement, we are not the only ones with nostalgic ears of voice. So, let's talk about children of the fatherland, why is our nation so lacking in its past orality?

Drafts in my apartment cause the doors to open and creak, making it seem like someone is coming in to talk to me. Unable to block them. I don't know if it's cool ... or if these mini false hopes are going to gun me down

First, because there is time, comments Annaïck Le Bouëdec, researcher in Information and Communication Sciences. “In everyday life without confinement, we are in a great hurry and we turn to an efficient consumption of the conversation, convinced that by dealing in writing, we will save time. Speaking, there is a whole social package, full of rules of communication and politeness that surrounds the message. Now, now that we have time not knowing what to do, "we are looking again for this social conditioning that we used to find time consuming."

Oral first

Social is the word to understand why we are now happier in front of a Skype than in the face of Pavard's volley against Argentina. By calling our friends, our family or our loved ones, we expect to recreate a semblance of sociability, well undermined by this confinement. "Our interactions are oral bases, it is our condition of sociability, the language itself is first of all oral", recontextualizes Laurence Brunet-Hunault, lecturer in linguistics and semiology. Who takes the time to remind us in case that human beings were already chatting for millennia before the appearance of writing. If the invention of writing marks the passage from prehistory to History, it is probably the birth of the spoken word that founds us as Humanity.

And if we had thought that nothing would change thanks to the instantaneity of Facebook or WhatsApp messages, Laurence Brunet-Hunault draws up the observation of our failure: "We notice that the oral remains the key to the interaction where we react more spontaneously and less by reasoning. Nothing replaces the oral. "

Words fly away, writings stay down to earth

This is what is said. It remains to be understood why the spoken word is so superior than that in writing? What makes our messenger conversations so dull compared to having a beer over a buddy - apart from so-called beer? Engraved in stone, the writing is however very smooth in truth. “The repertoire of form and signifiers available in writing (words, punctuation, capital letters, emojis) are fairly normalized and standardized. Of course everyone has their expressions and their way of writing, but there will never be the diversity and finesse of the oral, which allows to better reconstruct the uniqueness of each person ", Camille Debras size, also mistress of conferences in linguistics.

Orally, the panel is greatly densified: timbre of voice, intonation, speech rate, mimicry, there is plenty to do. Our voice is more signed than our writings. "Oral communication, even without vision, goes through many other channels than words," insists Camille Debras on the other end of the phone. And the whole also better reconstructs the emotions. Speaking with a smile or clenching your teeth is not the same voice that will come out.

Sacred sharing

And then the oral, it is also the field of non-mastery. Laurence Brunet-Hunault lists the hesitations, the flaws, the stumbling words, the badly chosen ones, in short the holy trinity of what we currently lack: humanity, authenticity and spontaneity. The observation is obvious: we do not say the same thing in writing and orally, and we are not the same either. “By message you can give another version of yourself. Not by oral. We are in immediate response, with a direct exchange feedback, we no longer have time to build these pretenses, "says the linguist.

And as life is very bleak at the moment, a little love and affection: the conversation by voice, it is also a question of sharing and co-presence. We can manage several conversations at the same time in writing - that the one who has never had seven active conversation windows on Messenger throws the first stone for us -, hardly more than one on the phone. "In this confinement, we are inevitably in need of moments with many, speaking there is a real notion of sharing together a moment, a very rare synchrony in such moments which becomes vital", points Camille Debras.

If we did not realize this importance which seemed more banal than vital, confinement sets the record straight: “We are deprived of an active freedom to which we did not find any added value before being suddenly private ”, concludes the lecturer. For whom Skype aperitifs and phone calls will not be enough for a long time: "I can't wait for everyone to find our loved ones for real conversations". U.S. too.

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• Containment
• Coronavirus
• Covid 19
• Society
• Language