Slang is one area of language that can be difficult to describe, not necessarily because it’s complex, but because it’s dynamic. Since it arises in the spoken language in informal situations, it is not tied to the written language and it goes in whatever direction its speakers feel like taking it.This is definitely something we can observe in Verlan, a form of French slang used in France.
What is Verlan?
The way Verlan basically works is that two syllables of a word switch places with each other, reversing their order (sometimes with slight changes).
Énervé (“irritated”) becomes vénère.
Choper (“to catch/arrest”) becomes pécho, repurposed to mean “hit on” or “chat up” girls.
This is fairly straightforward for two syllable words.
This also takes place in some single syllable words. For example:
cher (“expensive”) becomes reuch. The release of the consonant “r” in cher can be perceived as a slight schwa vowel, so /ʁə/ becomes the first syllable and morphs into /ʁœ/. Che (/ʃɛ/)becomes the second syllable, but then the e is dropped. That sounds complicated when explained, but with a few examples it becomes straightforward.
mec (“guy, dude”) – > keum
fête (“party) – > teuf
femme (“woman, girl”) – > meuf
It’s used differently by different people
One interesting thing about Verlan is that people use it differently depending on various elements of their identity and lifestyle. In the responses to my video on Verlan, there were many comments pointing out example words from the video that “don’t exist”, that “nobody uses”, even though I found real use cases online for every word I included. There are certain age ranges, geographic areas, and socioeconomic backgrounds that partly determine how much Verlan a person uses. The people who use the most Verlan are (it seems) either from les banlieues (the lower income suburbs with subsidized housing complexes) or are teens/young adults. These two groups of people might use Verlan words that more mainstream adults have never heard, and stop using those words if they do become adopted by the mainstream. And groups of friends create their own in-group slang that outsiders may be unfamiliar with.
One interesting way that the innovators of slang deal with mainstream adoption of “cool” Verlan words is to re-verlanize them. For example, arabe (“Arab”) becomes “beur” when verlanized, but has been re-verlanized to rebeu. Such words are basically the result of double Verlan.
Another way they deal with mainstream adoption of slang words is to simply abandon them. Slang is, in a sense, an expression of independence, a statement that your personality and the way you communicate does not conform to what everybody else is doing. So, when everybody else starts using it, it becomes uncool to the innovators (while it’s still cool to the people who have just discovered it). A lot of responses to the video mention older people using corny Verlan to try to sound cool. Maybe they’re using Verlan that was cool to the mainstream 30 years ago, and cool to the innovators of slang 31 or 32 years ago.
The dynamic nature of slang is what makes it fun and interesting to use (and to innovate), but that also makes it hard to learn slang as a learner of a language. It’s best to leave slang for situations in which people use it, since it’s used differently by different groups of people and in different situations. If you learn it in context only when it seems relevant, then you’ll avoid the embarrassment of communicating the wrongs things to the wrong people at the wrong time.
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