Difference between revisions of "Verlan (France)"

{{infobox

  | nameofpractice = Verlan

  | location = France

  | imagemap = France map.png

  | imageflag = France flag.png

  | authorofpiece = Rebecca Stewart

  | authorinstitution = University College London

}}

'''''Original text by Rebecca Stewart'''''

''Verlan'' is a form of French slang featuring the inversion of syllables to create new words and was originally used by the first generation of children born in France to North African immigrants as an in-group or secret language. Its proliferation in the housing projects in the outer suburbs of Paris became an exhaustive area of study in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Bachmann and Basier 1984<ref>Bachmann, C. and Basier, L. 1984. ‘Le verlan: argot d'école ou langue des Keums?’ Mots, 8(1): 169-187.</ref>; Méla 1991<ref>Méla, V. 1991. Le verlan ou le langage du miroir. Langages, 101: 73-94.</ref>). ''Verlan'' quickly gained notoriety as a method of disguising criminal activity in the ''banlieues'' (city outskirts) from the police. These days, ''Verlan'' appears to be used much less maliciously and by a wider social spectrum, although some of the original prejudices against its use still remain.

In Europe in particular there is a plethora of slang lexicons, such as ''Rotwelsch'' in German, ''furbesco'' in Italian and of course ''argot'' in French (Burke and Porter 1995<ref>Burke, P. and Porter, R. (eds.). (1995). Languages and jargons: contributions to a social history of language. Polity Press.</ref>). It would appear that ''Verlan'' has its roots in the French slang of ''argot'', which François-Geiger (1991<ref>François-Geiger, D. 1991.‘Panorama des argots contemporains’, Langue française, 90: 5-9.</ref>) splits into two main categories; firstly, its original intended use was as a cryptolect by various gangs in nineteenth century France as a means of concealing criminal activity; and secondly, the ''parlers branchés'' (this could be translated as ‘trendy speech’) was employed within different areas of culture as a means of both identification and to disguise meaning. In some ways, ''Verlan'' can be viewed as a revival of the traditional functions of ''argot''; a fundamentally oral phenomenon, it is particularly prevalent in large urban conurbations and in some cases has similar functions, the most important of which is as a means of masking certain topics of conversation from outsiders (''ibid''). With its use of syllabic inversion, Verlan falls into the category of ‘reversal ludlings’ (Bagemihl 2005<ref>Bagemihl, B.  1995. ‘Language games and related areas’, in John A. Goldsmith (ed.), The handbook of phonological theory, Oxford: Blackwell: 697-712.</ref>), present in Europe in the forms of Pig Latin (Treiman 1989<ref>Treiman, R.1989. ‘The internal structure of the syllable’, In Linguistic structure in language processing Springer Netherlands: 27-52.</ref>) and some aspects of Cant or Shelta (Kirk and Ò Baoill 2002<ref>Kirk, J. M. and Ó Baoill, D.P. (eds.),  2002. Travellers and their Language (Vol. 4). Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.</ref>). However, it is perhaps the Balkan slang ''Šatrovački'' which is the most similar to ''Verlan'', given its popularity amongst young immigrant populations, its function of disguising criminal activity, and the choice of words it incorporates into its lexicon, which tend to be drug- or crime-based (Rizzolo 2004<ref>Rizzolo, O. 2004. Šatrovački: la construction et l’exploitation d’un corpus de verlan serbo-croate. Corpus, (3).</ref>; Rìos 2009<ref>Ríos, J. V. 2009. Linguistique et sociolinguistique du verlan à travers le monde. Analecta Malacitana, (26):197-214.</ref>). Rizzolo gives as examples the Serbo-Croat words ''džok'', meaning ‘joint’, which becomes ''kədžo'', and ''nož'' (‘knife’) which turns into ''žəno'' (2004:276-7<ref>Rizzolo, O. 2004. Šatrovački: la construction et l’exploitation d’un corpus de verlan serbo-croate. Corpus, (3).</ref>).

The cultural importance of ''verlan'' is highlighted in the 1995 film ''La Haine'', in which the director Matthieu Kassowitz draws on French society's understanding of the slang. The film's events take place against the backdrop of a Parisian council estate, focusing on the frustrations of residents of ''la zone'' (the ‘slum belt’). Kassowitz appears to have made it as ‘viewer-friendly’ as possible whilst also conveying the message that the characters' speech is different from that of the more bourgeois society that they encounter in central Paris. Peters sums this up well:

==Notes==