Verlan
In the
French language,
verlan is the inversion of
syllables in a word which is found in
slang and
youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of permuting syllables of words to create slang words. The name
verlan is itself an example:
verlan =
lan ver = l'envers (meaning
the inverse).
As most potential readers here are not French-speakers, the following is an English approximation of
verlan, which could be called
versin (
inverse inverted).
My piano is broken, phooey.might be transformed into
My nopia is kenbro, eephoo.Verlan generally retains the pronunciation of the original syllables. In particular, French words that end in an
e muet (a
schwa,
eu, such as
femme) and words which end in a pronounced consonant and which usually have an e muet added at the end (such as
flic) retain the sound of the e muet in
verlan. In addition,
verlan often drops the final vowel sound after the word is inverted, so
femme and
flic become
meuf and
keuf, respectively. Some words have had their syllables inverted twice; for example,
femme >
meuf >
feumeuDifferent rules apply when dealing with one-syllable words, and, in certain dialects of
verlan, certain words are usually inverted and certain words are not. Words like
très remain unchanged in most dialects, while
femme is usually inverted. Some
verlan words (like meuf, from femme=woman) have become so commonplace that they have been included into the
Petit Larousse, that a "verlanised" version was rendered necessary, and the verlanised
verlan became "feumeu".
As with many
language games,
verlan suffers from the fact that it is primarily a spoken language passed down orally, and thus there exists no standardized spelling. While some still argue that the letters should be held over from the original word, in the case of
verlan most experts agree that words should be spelt as to best approximate
pronunciation, hence the use of
verlan as opposed to
versl'en.
Theoretically any word can be translated into
verlan but by reflex only a couple of expressions are used in everyday speech. Verbs translated into
verlan cannot be conjugated easily. There is no such thing as a
verlan grammar so most of the time verbs are used in the infinitive, past participle or progressive form.
For example :
*
J'étais en train de pécho une bombe but not
je pécho[ais] or
je p[ais]cho ("I was hitting on a hot chick")
Verlan is not so much a language as a means to underline certain words. The fact that a lot of verlan words refer either to
sex or
drugs stems from its original purpose: to keep the communication secret from institutions of social control. Nobody would solely use
verlan while talking.
Verlan words and expressions would rather be mixed inside a more general
argotique language.
Generally speaking, creating a
verlan word on the fly from any random French word will result in smirks. However, understanding
verlan words heard in specific situations will help understand what many young people living in French
banlieue (suburbs) actually say. One might also want to use those words to ingratiate oneself with these groups.
One of the reasons that
verlan has not caught on in English-speaking countries is precisely that
morphology in French is less strict than in English, and so French syllables are more conducive to inversion from
linguistic and
aesthetic standpoints, however, similar manners of speaking such as
Pig Latin or
backslang, are used in English-speaking cultures.
A very similar process (
vesre, from Spanish
revés) is used in
Argentinian slang
Lunfardo, in
Colombia, and in
Greek slang
podana (the reverse form of
ana-poda, i.e. backwards).
Persons*Femme (woman) ' meuf
*Mec (man) ' keum
*Pute (whore) ' teu-pu
*Pétasse (bitch) ' tasspé
*Frère (brother) ' reuf
*S"ur (sister) ' reus
*Mère (mother) ' reum
*Père (father) ' reup
*Moi (me) ' ouam
*Toi (you) ' ouat
*Parents (parents) ' remps
*Flic (cop) ' keuf
*Beur (Arabic person) ' reubeu
*Noir (Black person) ' reunoi
*Celui-la (Him) ' La-cui, lawis
*Celle-la (Her) ' La-celle
; Adjectives
*Méchant (mean, but also wicked) ' chanmé
*Gentil (friendly, nice) ' tigen
*Enervé (angry) ' véner
*Bête (silly) ' tebé
*Défoncé (stoned) ' fonsdé
*Louche (weird) ' chelou
*Pourri (rotten, corrupt) ' ripou
*Lourd (heavy, boring) ' relou
*Bizarre (weird) ' zarb/ zarbi
*Fou (crazy, insane) ' ouf
*Comme ça (this way) ' kom ass
or ça com
or ass meuk
;Verbs
*Choper (hit on a girl, buy drugs) ' pécho
*Matter (look at) ' téma
*Fumer (smoke) ' méfu
*Vas-y (com'on) ' zyva
*Carrot' (being deceived by someone, or something) ' rotca
;Nouns
*Métro (tube) ' tromé
*Truc (stuff) ' keutru
*Soirée (party) ' réssoi
*Cigarette (cigarette) ' garetci
*Gramme (gram) ' meug
*Herbe (weed) ' beuh
*Barette (stick of hash) ' retba
*Disque (CD) ' skeud
*
Argot*
Cockney rhyming slang*
Panamanian Spanish*
Language game*
Langue verte*
Louchebem*
Lunfardo*
Pig Latin*
Polari*
Šatrovački - same principle as
verlan, in (
Serbian,
Bosnian,
Croatian,
Macedonian)
*
Shelta (ISO 639-2: cel [
1]) - similarities to
verlan, in
Irish.
*
Spoonerism*
Vesre*
Nadsat*
Variety (linguistics)*
BBC report*
about.com article
