charclo

The slang word charclo, a slang word meaning tramp, bum, hobo, is an example of an interesting slang system that has developed in French called Verlan. Verlan has been predominant around Paris for several decades at least, but is widely used in various French cities. Appearences of Verlan in French culture include the songs of Renaud Séchan, films such as La Haine and the writing of authors such as Vincent Ravalec. And for reasons we'll see in a moment, the name of French singer Bénabar is actually a Verlan form of Barnabé.

What is a slang system?

Many languages have slang systems (the French term for which is argot à clé). A slang system is a way of deriving slang words or expressions in some regular way. A notable slang system in English is Cockney Rhyming slang (where a slang expression is found that rhymes with the original, and then is optionally truncated to the first word, e.g. look > butcher's hook > butcher's).

Overview of Verlan

In Verlan, words are generally verlanised by reversing or changing the order of their syllables. So the word char.clo dervices from the Frnech word clo.chard by reversing the syllables. Other common two-syllable examples include:

café > féca
câblé ("hip", "trendy") > bléca
métro > tromé
musique > zicmu
pétard > tarpé ("cigarette", "joint")
tomber > béton (as in "laisse béton" = "forget it")

Oh, and of course, the name verlan is itself Verlan for l'envers (="back to front").

Different orders of syllables are possible with words or phrases of more than two syllables. With these longer expressions, other possibilities include reversing sounds within a syllable (moi > oim) and appealing to spelling (in nez, the z is not pronounced, but in zen, it is). For example:

cigarette > garettesi
lâche-moi! > chelaoime!
portugais > gaitupor

Single-syllable words can also be verlanised, either by reversing sounds within the syllable as we've seen, or by appending a "schwa" sound to the end of the word (as naturally occurs in very careful or emphatic speech in French), reversing the two syllables, and then removing part of the reversed word. For example:

femme > [fa.m@] > meuf(a) > meuf ("bird", "chick", "lass")
flic ("cop") > [fli.k@] > keuf(li) > keuf
mec ("guy") > [me.k@] > keum(e) > keum

Note that the spellings of Verlan words are often fairly arbitrary-- they're essentially spoken forms, after all. In literature, you will see variants that attempt to catch Verlan forms spoken in particular accents, for example moffe instead of meuf (which captures an accent more typical of Western France).

Verlan and linguistics

Verlan is interesting to linguistics because it helps to confirm or deny certain models of sound processes that occur in speech, and how speakers intuitively "organise" the units that make up speech. For example, if certain sounds tend not to be reversed in verlanisation, it supports the idea that those sounds form some kind of "group" or "unit". Or it helps to confirm statements such as "this vowel never occurs in a closed syllable" if speakers do indeed modify that vowel when verlanisation would make us expect it to be impossible (e.g. the eu vowel of flic(eu) > keuf actually changes to reflect its new environment), or alternatively question it when an otherwise rare sequence of sounds suddenly appears when a word is verlanised (joint > oinge).

Origins of Verlan

Despite some claims, there may have been no one person or group that "invented" Verlan. In every language, speech errors are fairly common and natural in which sounds or syllables are accidentally reversed or transposed, to the point that sometimes these transpositions get fixed in the language (compare the difference between French crocodile with, say, Spanish cocodrilo). So Verlan may have come about gradually, as it became "trendy" to mock these natural processes. Some other languages have developed similar systems, probably independent of French.

Some early examples of re-ordered syllables include Bonbour for Bourbon, attested as early as 1585.[1]

[1] Larousse, Dictionnaire de l'Argot