The verlan, icon of the 1990s

Verlan is a form of slang that involves reversing the syllables of words to create new ones. Born from a need for concealment, this code has for several years been a strong identity and cultural symbol. Although it is now losing popularity among new generations, verlan continues to intrigue nostalgic people and fascinate younger people. A quick look back at a code that was once very much alive, and its mutations.

It is said that the first traces of verlan date back to the 17th century.^e century, but it was at the beginning of the 1970s that we found the first public attestations of verlan in French. Jacques Dutronc wrote a song about it in 1971, “I had the brain that made waves”, here is an extract:

“I had the vellecer who zaifeu des gueva when I received her in my arms I saw her a resoi of yaijui in a leba of the téco of the yeutibasse menvrai lijo it's a yeufi that I say to myself I have to I cheubran her. »

A few years later (1978), it was with Renaud's song “Laisse concret” (= “let it fall”) that the first forms of verlan began to spread.

Verlan quickly became a real linguistic weapon in the suburbs. It allows young people to distinguish themselves from previous generations while protecting their exchanges from prying ears: parents, authorities, or quite simply those who do not master this code.

But it was in the 1990s that verlan experienced a true golden age, driven by the rise of French rap. Musical groups like the AMER Ministry, IAM or NTM integrate it into their texts, making this language form a pillar of urban culture. Through pieces like “Little Brother” or “Flirte avec le Murder” Verlan becomes a committed voice, which allows us to denounce social inequalities, police violence, or even the difficulties of young people in the cities.

At the time, it was necessary to make an effort to understand this singer of the group NTM when he declared that he was “ready to fart for scalpas” (“ready to hit himself for pascals” – pascal was then the name given to the 500 franc notes of the time, because of the portrait of the philosopher who illustrated them).

The rules of the game: understanding the mechanics of the verlan

Linguistically, verlan follows relatively simple but rigid formation rules. The syllables of words are inverted, and sometimes, phonological truncations or reanalyses are necessary to make the pronunciation of the verlanized word fluent and natural.

In the simplest cases, which are also the most common, the syllables of a word containing two are simply reversed: matter (“look, often insistently”) becomes topic, French becomes cefran, rotten becomes restetc.

If the word ends in a consonant or an -e, a e is pronounced, which explains that mec become keume, head passes to teut, grave becomes veugraetc. In certain cases, the verlanized word undergoes an additional transformation, which consists of a truncation of the final vowel which is called apocope. It is this process that the words underwent guilty (reumeu = mother), reuf (reufrè = reuf), veuch (veucheu = hair), etc.

If the word has only one syllable, the vowel is pronounced before the consonant: hot becomes and, fou passes to phew, moi is pronounced wam, oinj is said for jointetc.

In the rarer cases of trisyllabic words, we have a slightly more complex process: the last syllable is placed first, and we only keep the second or first. Concretely, irritated goes through vé-ner-é to become revere (loss of the last element), Arab becomes beura after going through beu-a-ra, African passes to copper by modification of kin-a-fri.

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Through continued use, certain words ended up being known to everyone, and therefore had to be re-lanized. The verb fuckwhich had passed to ken by truncation of HAVE became take it. Keuf (apocoposed verlan of flic) became feukeuThen fuckby analogy with English, etc. Of these revernalizations only the word survives today rebeu (verlan of pourapocopoeic form of beura for Arabic).

Nowadays…

Verlan is not as fashionable as it was 30 years ago. It is estimated that it was in the late 1990s that the process lost vitality. We can hypothesize that its popularization in the media, music and advertising has gradually reduced its initial role as a “secret” code. Used by an increasingly wider and increasingly aging public, verlan has lost its appeal among new generations. These favored other forms of expression, from the digital world and social networks, little used then by older people (geek, scroller, askip, asap, ghosteretc.).

However, there remain forms in the French language that have entered the dictionary. Small overview:

Grandma : verlan of toubaban Arabic word originating from Sahelian Africa, attested in French since the mid-21st century^e century to designate a European person, a metropolitan Frenchman or a white person, quite simply. This verlanized variant joined the pages of Robert in 2023.

Ugh : attested in 1986, the word ugh is the verlanized and apocope form of the word grass (hèr-beu = beu-hèr = weed). Maintaining the h final in the spelling can perhaps be explained analogically: ugh is the way onomatopoeia is spelled which expresses disgust or amused contempt.

Keupon : the first appearance of this verlanized form of the word punk is not dated. In all likelihood, it cannot go back further than 1973. It is in fact from this date that French borrows the word from American slang, which designates in France as in the United Kingdom a protest movement which brings together young people displaying various external signs of provocation against the social order that they deride.

Girl : the word girl is attested as early as 1981. Due to the frequency of its use, it belongs with other words formed on the same model (ughverlan apocopé de fête, 1984; buyapocopic verlan of flic1978), words which we often forget are the result of a process of verlanization.

Phew : we find the word phew in texts written since 1988. It keeps the same meaning as the adjective fouto which it corresponds. It is used to describe something or someone as surprising, incredible, or impressive. It can have a positive or negative connotation depending on the context. For example, “That’s wow!” » can mean “this is incredible!” » or “this is crazy!” »

Verlan : attested in 1953, the word itself is a self-reference to its own linguistic process (“ [à] the reverse » = Verlan). It is today integrated into the general vocabulary to designate not only this specific phenomenon of syllable inversion, but also, by extension, this form of slang popular in the 1990s.

Verlan words emerged in the 1970s, but not all met the same fate. We can see in this graph, generated from Google Books data, that in French-speaking literature, words like girl (woman) remain more used than words like relou (heavy) or weird (shady), which were later democratized (and which still do not appear in widely used dictionaries). Finally, the trajectory that we can see from the word Verlan clearly shows that the process experienced increasing and then stable vitality between 1990 and 2000, before falling gently again at the start of the 21st century.^e century.