Back slang is an English language coded language in which the written word is spoken Phoneme backwards.
Usage
Back slang is thought to have originated in
Victorian era England. It was used mainly by market sellers, such as
and
, for private conversations behind their customers' backs and to pass off lower-quality goods to less-observant customers.
The first published reference to it was in 1851, in
Henry Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor.
Some back slang has entered Standard English. For example, the term
yob was originally back slang for "boy". Back slang is not restricted to words spoken phonemically backwards. English frequently makes use of
, which is an issue for back slang since diphthongs cannot be reversed. The resulting fix slightly alters the traditional back slang. An example is
trousers and its diphthong,
ou, which is replaced with
wo in the back slang version
reswort.
In 2010, back slang was reported to have been adopted for the sake of privacy on foreign tennis courts by the young English players Laura Robson and Heather Watson.
Other languages
Other languages have similar coded forms but reversing the order of
rather than phonemes. These include:
-
French language verlan, in which e.g. français fʁɑ̃sɛ becomes céfran sefʁɑ̃;
-
French language louchébem, which relies on syllables inversion too, but also adds extra syllables;
-
Greek language podaná
-
IsiXhosa & isiZulu Ilwimi/Ulwimi used mostly by teenagers, often called "high school language";
-
Japanese tougo (倒語), where moras of a word are inverted and vowels sometimes become long vowels ( hara, “stomach”, becomes raaha);
-
Romanian Totoiana, in which syllables of Romanian words are inverted so that other Romanian speakers can not understand it;
-
Lunfardo, a Spanish language argot spoken in Argentina, includes words in vesre (from revés, literally "backwards");
-
Šatrovački, a Serbo-Croatian slang system;
-
19th century Swedish language (e.g. the word fika, which means approximately "coffee break").
-
Sheng slang (e.g. ngware becomes rengwa)
See also
External links
