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On Friday I visited Le Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and among other things, I learned that there will be opportunities for marketing the iPeeve™ in France as well. In particular, for the past few decades, French speakers have been using genre ("sort, kind, type") as an approximative discourse particle similar to English like. An example from the web:

… apres moultes problemes pour se lever on est parti genre 4 heures en retard sur le pouce.

"after many problems getting up, we got underway like 4 hours late"

Some others:

Je suis genre rarement enervé.

"I'm like rarely upset"

… en ce moment, non seulement j'ai du mal à avoir accès au net, mais en plus je suis genre super occupé.

"… right now, not only am I having difficulty getting access to the net, but also I'm like super busy."

J'marche sul bord d'un muret pis ya une marmotte qui me suit sul muret, a genre meme pas 30 cm de moi.

"I walk along a low wall, and there's a marmot who follows me on the wall, like not even 30 cm from me."

You might think that genre would work more like English "sort of", but "sort of" really doesn't fit these examples very well.

There's even a Facebook group "Pour ceux qui disent 'genre' 36 fois par phrases" ("for those who say 'genre' 36 times per sentence"), which offer this quote:

Bah c'était genre chaud, avec genre des triangle, genre spéciaux, avec des angles genre chelous, enfin c'était hyper dur, genre, tu vois ?"

I'll leave the translation to some Francophone commenter who is more plugged into current slang. I can see that chelou is verlan for louche, which makes me suspect that the triangle in question is a metaphorical one, but it's easy to get this kind of thing wrong.

I've seen a few indications that there's also a quotative genre, as in

Et je suis, genre, ouais, quoi encore?

"And I was, like, yeah, what again?"

Je suis genre rarement enervé

But this doesn't seem especially common. And in the marmot story, the author uses quotative comme instead:

La chu comme "watsup la marmotte" pis yo, a sretourne pis a s'met sur 2 pattes. Au début, j'fais un peu ma farouche, chu comme "ptet ka va mtuer" so j'back down un peu, tsé jconnais pas trop ca moi des marmotte, j'pas au courrant des super power que ca peut avoir pis toute.

This story is apparently Quebecois (at least that's my association with chu = "je suis"), but my consultants at the LPP assure me that genre is common in France as well.

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