Multisyllabic Verlan

Verlan is a concept in the French language where syllables swap places to form a new word that holds the same meaning - merci -> cimer for example, both meaning thank you.

It is commonly found in slang and informal speech, originally primarily used by French youth to encodify their language from outgroups such as the police, but eventually spreading to the mainstream.

The word verlan itself is derived as the verlan of l’envers, meaning reverse.

I was recently rummaging through some of my old homework and notes from undergrad and stumbled across a problem that I distinctly remember being stumped by.

Okay so far so good.

What?

Even without forming the syllable trees, it’s clear that there’s going to be multiple different surface forms that arise from verlan.

Do we simply reverse all syllables and read the word back to front? If we think about it, there’s really no verlan being done in that case as the syllables would all be in the same place relative to each other. Well what about moving one or two of the syllables around? How do we know what to move when verlan only provides clear rules for bisyllabic words?

Here is what I wrote and submitted verbatim:

For énervé and existence, I made sure that after swapping the syllables around from the original word, If I were to re-syllabify the resulting word, the same syllables would remain. If there were multiple options that retained the original syllables, I would eliminate the ones with clusters of equal sonority e.g. choosing [zi.ɛɡ.stɑ̃s] over [ɛɡ.tɑ̃s.zi]

What does that even mean really? I knew back then I had no real answer and just made up some nonsense to try and justify why I answered a certain way.

So what’s the real answer? The present me who was still curious did some digging… only to find there is no agreed upon answer… There are some general guidelines and processes that tend to happen though.

The first is that words get internally split into two chunks with a pivot, even if they contain more than two syllables.

How do you decide on what forms a chunk and what acts as a pivot? This leads us to the second guideline, which is that verlan tends to respect morphological stems and prosody.

We can see this in the two examples above. Foncer/foncé are preexisting words in their own right, and dé is a valid French prefix, leading to a natural split. Ci is not a valid prefix, and garette is not a real word, but garette does nicely form a chunk that works well with the syllable final stress patterning in French prosody.

This is also why existence and other words like it don’t have widely attested verlan forms and don’t seep into mainstream vocabulary. There’s no good way to break them down internally like défoncé or cigarette. Which also means that my old homework didn’t actually have a correct answer, and my professor was just testing our reasoning 😠.

It was a fun afternoon trying to resolve this longstanding brain worm however.

Real language is so full of quirks and inexplicabilities.