Argot (and so on)

Wowww okay so I have been meaning to write this post since January 16th...or maybe even since Summer '08.  Trouble is, I've had the note on my desktop so long that I kind of forget what I meant to write about.  Still, when has that ever stopped me..?

So actually, back in the summer of 2008, when I was living in Aix-en-Provence, I had a number of interesting conversations with French people about their language.  And yes, these conversations were held in French.  (I touched on this, actually, in one of those old entries.) That period in my life will never cease to astonish me.

Everyone knows that the language one learns in a classroom doesn't have much in common with the language one will be butchering on the street when one visits the country where said language is spoken.  This runs deeper, though, than never having the opportunity to use the phrase, "my pink pencil case was under the boiler last Thursday"; it's more than commonly-used vocabulary and not being taught the swear-words (nom d'un nom d'un nom d'un nom!), because there are whole language systems that they'll never teach in school.

French slang - and I'm discussing French because it is the language I am most familiar with (aside, obviously, from English) - comes in a myriad of flavors.  There's Verlan and Louchébem, languages that use a traditional French technique of syllabic inversion, working sort of like Pig Latins (but rather more complex).  These also have elements of secret coded rhyming slangs like Cockney, it seems.

Anyway, an example of Verlan that has made it into mainstream, in order to make this less confusing.  Keep in mind that Louchébem has completely different rules.  But okay: we start with arabe, Arab (the nationality)...this is inverted to form the Verlan equivalent beur (you have to remember that, in French, phonemes and graphemes play fast and loose).  This in turn has become further inverted now that the original slang meaning is common knowledge, so that the new term rebeu has been born.  Interestingly, it would seem that the semantic meaning also shifts with each transformation...while the first word refers to someone from northern Africa, the second appears to mean anyone of Arabic descent, and I haven't had this confirmed by any native speaker, but might the third version be the next generation?

Also interestingly - and I was told this by a French native speaker, although I'm not sure I believe it (not to mention that I am recalling it correctly) - apparently there are no racial slurs in these street slangs, just racist constructions and contexts. 

Right.  seven paragraphs in and I still haven't mentioned my title.  Technically everything I've discussed up to now has been Argot, a word that, translated from French to English, itself means slang.  The wonderful thing about French Argot is how dynamic it is (as seen above), how adaptive and how democratic.  Like I said, you can't learn it in a classroom, and dictionaries really don't do it justice.  However, if you're interested despite my warnings, there's a dictionary here of basic slang vocabulary, and there are also a surprisingly large number of scholarly articles online if you're feeling rather more highbrow.