Abstract:
Verlan is a language game that has long existed in France, but became
widely-used by youth from the banlieues, the French suburban “ghetto,” in the
1970s. It reverses a Standard French word to produce a new form that acts both as
a method of encryption and a marker of identity. Much work has already been
done on the phonological operations behind Verlan and on its sociolinguistic
setting in modern France. I analyzed the existing literature and four corpora
spanning between 1991 and 2001 to determine which Verlan words did not follow
the rules of transformation and whether there were any rules or sub-rules
underlying these exceptions. I also performed a pilot experiment to determine
whether Verlan could be easily learned and successfully learned by two native
speakers of French. Both the analysis and the experiment showed that “correct”
forms of Verlan do not depend on exactly following the rules of transformation or
on other set principles; rather, they depend on knowing which rules the group
applies to create specific terms. They also showed that Verlan has become harder
to speak “correctly” over time. Today, knowing the tastes and conventions of the
group of listeners is just as important as knowing the general rules of
transformation, a sign that as Verlan becomes more widespread, its original
speakers will create more exceptions and idiosyncrasies to maintain it as a marker
for their identity and a method for linguistic concealment.
