Even those of us who have studied French for years may find themselves confused when they overhear conversations among the young that sound familiar but remain largely incomprehensible. What they are hearing is the popular slang called Verlan in which standard French spellings or syllables are reversed or recombined, or both. Thus the word café becomes "féca"; the métro "tromé"; woman, femme, becomes "meuf" and so on. (For a short dictionary, see the sidebar.) The word Verlan itself is a "Verlanization" of the term l'envers, meaning "the reverse." Within a couple of decades, Verlan has spread from the poor housing projects at the periphery of big cities and gained widespread popularity among young people across France. It has seeped into film dialogue, advertising campaigns, French rap and hip-hop, and mainstream media. It has even made it into some of the leading dictionaries. It's a language of alienation that has, paradoxically, also become a means of integration. Verlan reflects France's love-hate relationship with its immigrant community and has begun to attract a number of scholarly studies.

"Speaking backwards becomes a metaphor of opposition, of talking back," writes Natalie Lefkowitz, a professor of French applied linguistics at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and the author of Talking Backwards, Looking Forwards : The French Language Game Verlan (Gunter Narr, 1991), which was one of the