Verlan and slang: should you learn the French that textbooks leave out?
How verlan works, where French slang comes from, and which words a learner can actually use.
The ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, completed in 2024, defines verlan as a slang built on swapping syllables, and gives chelou and meuf as examples. Understanding these words becomes useful from level B1 onwards. Using them yourself is a separate decision, and a very different skill.
Why are French film dialogues still impossible to follow?
You handle your lessons, you read the news, and yet ten minutes of a French series lose you completely. This is not only a question of speed, which we covered in our article on fast spoken French. It is a question of vocabulary.
Textbooks teach one register. The Language Portal of Canada distinguishes six levels of French: literary, formal, standard, familiar, popular and vulgar. Standard is defined as the correct language people normally use, familiar as the words and sentence patterns used in everyday conversation, and popular as a looser level considered incorrect.
The same request changes shape at every level. Pourriez-vous m'aider, s'il vous plaît? is formal. Pourrais-tu me donner le beurre? is standard. Passe-moi le beurre! is familiar. All three are correct French in their own situation. A textbook drills you almost exclusively on the second one, while film dialogue sits in the third.
How does verlan actually work?
The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française defines it as a slang based mainly on permuting the syllables of certain words, sometimes with added vowel changes and shortenings. The name itself is à l'envers, meaning backwards, run through the process.
The mechanism has three steps:
- split the word into syllables: lou-che, fem-me, fran-çais;
- reverse the order: che-lou, me-feu, çais-fran;
- adjust the vowel or cut the ending: chelou, meuf, céfran.
That third step is what makes verlan hard to catch by ear. Meuf no longer sounds much like femme. Other forms stay transparent: lourd gives relou, énervé gives vénère, fou gives ouf. A word that has already been through the process can go through it twice: beur becomes rebeu.
English speakers have a useful point of comparison here. Back slang, Cockney rhyming slang and Pig Latin all play the same kind of game with word shape, and all three carry the same social signal: an in-group marker that outsiders are not expected to reproduce.
Nor is verlan a product of 1980s music. The abstract of Xavier Bach's 2018 article in the Journal of French Language Studies, volume 28, issue 1, presents the edition of a nineteenth century letter described as the only known text written with features of verlan before the twentieth century. Bach adds a useful point: backward slangs can originate in the education system as much as in the underworld of thieves.
Where do the other slang words come from?
Verlan is only one process among several. Much of the familiar lexicon comes from borrowings, and a recent study finally puts numbers on it.
Lucas Zurbuchen and Rob Voigt presented an analysis in the 2024 proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics covering 8,222 French rap lyrics published between 1991 and 2024, totalling 4,563,577 words. They built a lexicon of 741 borrowings and found 98,740 instances. The headline figure: borrowings now account for about 2 per cent of all words in that corpus, a share that has doubled since the 1990s. Borrowings from Afro-Asiatic languages, Arabic in particular, stay at around 10 per cent of the total and remain stable over time, while borrowings from Niger-Congo languages are growing fastest. The figures are set out in their paper, which is open access.
In other words, contemporary French slang is not a fixed stock of reversed words. It is a lexicon renewed by borrowing, part of which eventually enters general dictionaries.
Which ones can you actually use, and when?
Understanding and producing do not cost the same. Recognising two hundred familiar words takes a few hours and makes a series watchable. Using twenty of them correctly takes a feel for the situation that is built over years.
Three circles, from safest to riskiest:
- established familiar words such as bosser, un bouquin, un truc or une bagnole. They are heard everywhere, and you can use them in speech once you are comfortable;
- lexicalised verlan such as chelou, relou or meuf. It is easy to understand, but in a learner's mouth it draws attention to itself rather than to what is being said;
- recent generational slang, which turns over every three or four years. Understand it, never reuse it unless you have heard it used in front of you.
Three contexts rule out familiar register outright: professional writing, a DELF or DALF exam, where examiners explicitly assess whether your register fits the situation, and any conversation with someone you address as vous, a point we covered in our article on tu and vous. When in doubt, standard register never counts against you.
What these numbers do not tell you
The authors of the 2024 study set out the limits of their own work. Their corpus is song lyrics, not ordinary conversation. Their selection runs through music platforms, which disadvantages older tracks. Their lexicon of 741 forms was built by hand and remains incomplete, and their annotator is an English speaker, which may favour the detection of anglicisms. A percentage measured on rap does not transfer as it stands to a work meeting.
Second limit: slang ages fast. A word picked up from a 2005 film may already sound dated, and nothing tells a learner that a term has gone out of fashion.
Third limit, geography. Verlan is largely a mainland France phenomenon. In Quebec, Belgium, Switzerland and West Africa, familiar French runs on a different stock of words, as we saw in our article on Quebec French. Parisian verlan will not help you in Montreal.
Finally, a matter of priorities. If your goal is a diploma, a job or a residence permit, controlling the standard register is worth far more than fifty slang words. Slang is a comprehension bonus, not a shortcut to fluency. Our level test places you in a few minutes.
At Frenchee, classes are taught live by qualified native teachers, one to one or in small groups of three to five students, with no subscription. That is the setting where you can ask the question nothing else answers: this word I heard yesterday, can I say it, and to whom?
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