verlan : langage à l’envers

Examples of verlan in French:

laisse béton : laisse tomber
meuf : femme

This type of inversed language is not common in English today. One example of a word pronounced backwards which has entered into common speech is ‘yob’ from ‘boy’. Today a ‘yob’ is an uncouth, rowdy young man

Yob : voyou

Word inversions were used during the wars as a kind of code to confuse enemy invaders. A well-known backslang language is called ‘Pig-Latin’. It is formed by removing the first letter of a word, adding it to the end of the word followed by an ‘ay’ sound:

so the word ‘man’ would be ‘anmay’ in Pig Latin, and ‘woman’ would be ‘omanway’ . It is very similar to a slang called ‘louchébem’ in French. If you didn’t know, check out the wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louch%C3%A9bem

I remember as a youngster learning Birmingham ‘eggo’ language: this language was made by adding the word ‘egg’ after the first letter or pair of letters of each syllable:

home : heggome
street: streggeet
Constantinople : ceggonstegganteggineggopeggle

Categories: argot   |   Tags: argot, slang  |  No Comments »