Ça joue

Romand French

Said in French-speaking Switzerland

It works, all good

Where it comes from

Ça joue is the French-Swiss yes to anything that works: an appointment that suits, a repaired machine, accounts that balance. According to the Base de données lexicographiques panfrancophone (BDLP), which takes over for Switzerland the work of the Dictionnaire suisse romand, jouer means in French-speaking Switzerland “to work properly”, of a mechanism, and figuratively “to work out, to go, to suit”. It is mostly used impersonally, ça joue, ça ne joue pas, ça veut jouer, and it is said far more than it is written. The database still records it in the press as early as 1959, and in two books by Jacques Chessex, in 1977 and 1990.

Where does it come from? For the BDLP it is a French-Swiss innovation, apparently not very old: standard French says that a spring or a bolt “joue bien” when it moves freely, and French-speaking Switzerland extended this technical sense to the figurative.

In her study of Bolze, the mixed speech of Fribourg, the linguist Claudine Brohy places a close form, “ça veut déjà jouer”, among the calques from German heard in the lower town, which purists condemn even more than loanwords; she also notes a tendency to take any departure from standard French for a Germanism. She says nothing about “ça joue”, nor whether it would come from German.

In use

You say it to fix a meeting, or when nothing works:

“On se voit samedi à dix heures, ça joue ?” – See you Saturday at ten, does that work?
“Ça joue pas, la machine à café est de nouveau en panne.” – It’s not working, the coffee machine is broken again.

Sources: Base de données lexicographiques panfrancophone, Swiss database, “jouer” (senses 01, 02 and 03); Claudine Brohy, “Frontière des langues et urbanolecte hybride : le cas du bolze à Fribourg (Suisse)” (2017).