What is Verlan?

Verlan is a playful form of jargon used in French that involves swapping the syllables around in a given word. Someone employing Verlan might, for instance, say cimer instead of merci, or tufur instead of futur. In both of these cases, the last syllable of the word has been placed at the front, which can be confusing for anyone who isn’t familiar with this kind of slang.

That’s partly the point of Verlan - to act as a code to confuse certain listeners or obscure the meaning of a sentence.

You’re very unlikely to hear it used in a job interview or read it in an official document. It’s a secret but playful form of code, similar to Cockney rhyming slang in English or riocontra in Italian, although it has increasingly been adopted by younger generations as a fun and informal way to add flair to everyday French.

It’s a diverting way to think about French, but it’s also challenging for non-native speakers, and can be exhausting to put into practice and pick up on. Thankfully it rarely applies to every word in a sentence, and is instead usually only employed for certain important words, as in the following examples:

Parles-tu céfran ? - Do you speak French? (phonetic inversion of français)

Cimer pour l'invitation - Thank you for the invite (inversion of merci)

In fact Verlan itself is an example of Verlan, being an inversion of the word l’envers - 'the reverse'. Notice how, although the pronunciation is simply a case of inverting the syllables, the spelling is a little different to reflect the new pronunciation. For that reason it can be even more difficult to detect in written text than in spoken language.

Because of the informal, and generally oral nature of verlan, it is difficult to get an exact sense of when and where it has been used over time. The first record we have of verlan being used dates from the 19th century, as a word game played between prisoners, although it may have originated sooner (and indeed similar games have been played in France for centuries).

The secret nature of Verlan made it useful for criminals who wanted to conceal information from authorities. But its secretive nature made it useful to all sorts of people who considered themselves on the outer fringes of French culture. During the mid-20th century, it was adopted by many who lived in the banlieues, particularly first and second generation immigrants, for whom it became a mark of identity. In some cases it has incorporated words from other languages such as Arabic, Creole and even American slang.

Recently, it has gained popularity with teenagers, and even with the more affluent sections of society - where it's sometimes known as Verlan geoisbour (an inversion of bourgeois) - partly because of the influence of film, hip-hop and other media where Verlan features prominently.

Watch this video to see how it's used nowadays.

While formal French is strictly standardised by the Académie Française, Verlan isn’t. Different users of Verlan may choose to form words in different ways, swapping syllables round in different ways and coining their own inverted neologisms.

That said, there are some general tips and tricks you can stick to if you want to create your own Verlanisations. Most verlan words are two syllables, so inverting the syllables is relatively straightforward. Let’s look at a few common examples:

métro (subway) > tromé

méchant (cool) > chanmé

branché (trendy) > chébran

Sometimes vowels and consonants can move around within individual syllables too. The word esquiver (to dodge), for example, becomes vesqui in Verlan.

You can also use verlan for words which only contain one syllable. In this case, as with words with two syllables, the word is simply reversed - fou, meaning 'mad' becomes ouf, for example - although if it ends with a consonant, that letter can sometimes become a new syllable. For instance:

rap (rap music) > pera

truc (thing) > keutru

Words with three syllables or more can be verlanised in multiple ways. And just as one-syllable words can gain a syllable upon being verlanised, words with more then two syllables can lose syllables. For instance, rigolo, meaning 'funny', become golri in Verlan.

Verlan is not formal French, but does crop up quite often nowadays in conversational and informal contexts, especially on TV or in music. That said, even native French speakers can find it confusing, and that’s precisely why some people use it.

Some of the more common Verlanisations, however, such as meuf (femme), have made it into the Petit Larousse, and there’s no harm in learning some of these - you never know when you might end up in a situation where Verlan is being spoken. It’s also good to be aware of when and why verlan is spoken. It could be that the word you don’t understand and can’t find in any dictionaries is just a common word being flipped on its head.

For more on le verlan, check out our podcast.