the essential
The word “diarrhea” has a multitude of regional variations with very different common names depending on the region.
It's winter and the viruses are here. The flu was on a “sharp increase” the week before Christmas, figures from Public Health France revealed on Thursday. And this period is often conducive to gastroenteritis. With a disorder that many of us dread: diarrhea.
The official definition of diarrhea in Larousse is “too frequent emission of liquid or pasty stools, due to a lack of reabsorption of water by the intestine”. Diarrhea, or more trivially “chiasse”, are the most frequent words in France. However, this gastric disorder is called differently depending on the region:
- I fell in the South West
- Cacagne in the South-East
- Déripette in Brittany
- Halyard in the North
- Rafe in the Alps
Credit Mathieu Avanzi
There are even words with very local use: cliche, déclichette, chite, riclette, riflette, drouille, trisse or schnell-katrin. These common names were compiled in a map of France by Mathieu Avanzi, doctor of literature and language sciences, in his book “Le grand livre du français de nos régional” (Editions Le Robert).
This is one of the many examples which prove that in France, we do not express ourselves in exactly the same way depending on the region where we live. Among the best-known regionalisms, there is a pain au chocolat (a chocolatine in the South-West), a bag (a pocket in the South-West), a mop (a wassingue in the North), the funfair ( ducasse in the North) or a pencil (lead pencil in the East or wooden pencil in the North).
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