C'est pas blesipo: Variations of Verlan

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.

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