Back slang is an English coded language in which the written word is spoken phonetically backwards.
Back slang is thought to have originated in Victorian England. It was used mainly by market sellers, such as butchers and greengrocers, for private conversations behind their customers' backs and to pass off lower-quality goods to less-observant customers. [1] The first published reference to it was in 1851, in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor . [1] 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 diphthongs, 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. [1]
Back slang is said to be used in prisons by inmates to make it more difficult for prison wardens to listen into prisoners' conversations and find out what is being said.
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. [2]
Other languages have similar coded forms but reversing the order of syllables rather than phonemes. These include:
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.
Romanian is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries. To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. It is also spoken as a minority language by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania, and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 25 million people as a first language.
Verlan is a type of argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words. The word verlan itself is an example of verlan. It is derived from inverting the sounds of the syllables in l'envers. The first documented use of verlan dates back to the 19th century, among robbers.
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.
A diphthong, also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most varieties of English, the phrase "no highway cowboy" has five distinct diphthongs, one in every syllable.
Colloquial or spoken Finnish is the unstandardized spoken variety of the Finnish language, in contrast with the standardized form of the language. It is used primarily in personal communication and varies somewhat between the different dialects.
Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to Standard Finnish, which is based on the dialect spoken in the former Häme Province in central south Finland. Standard Finnish is used by professional speakers, such as reporters and news presenters on television.
Metathesis is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous segments or syllables, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:
Ë, ë (e-diaeresis) is a letter in the Albanian, Kashubian, Emilian, Romagnol, Ladin, and Lenape alphabets. As a variant of the letter e, it also appears in Acehnese, Afrikaans, Belarusian, Breton, Dutch, English, Filipino, French, Luxembourgish, Piedmontese, Russian, the Abruzzese dialect of the Neapolitan language, and the Ascolano dialect. The letter is also used in Seneca, Taiwanese Hokkien, Turoyo, and Uyghur when written in Latin script.
The phonology of Standard German is the standard pronunciation or accent of the German language. It deals with current phonology and phonetics as well as with historical developments thereof as well as the geographical variants and the influence of German dialects.
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
Vesre is the reversing of the order of syllables within a word in Spanish. It is a feature of Rioplatense Spanish slang and Tango lyrics, and is associated with lunfardo.
In the phonology of the Romanian language, the phoneme inventory consists of seven vowels, two or four semivowels, and twenty consonants. In addition, as with other languages, other phonemes can occur occasionally in interjections or recent borrowings.
In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis describes the occurrence of two separate vowel sounds in adjacent syllables with no intervening consonant. When two vowel sounds instead occur together as part of a single syllable, the result is called a diphthong.
In historical linguistics, vowel breaking, vowel fracture, or diphthongization is the sound change of a monophthong into a diphthong or triphthong.
Old English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative since Old English is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of the language, and the orthography apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology.
The Romanian dialects are the several regional varieties of the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian). The dialects are divided into two types, northern and southern, but further subdivisions are less clear, so the number of dialects varies between two and occasionally twenty. Most recent works seem to favor a number of three clear dialects, corresponding to the regions of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Banat, and an additional group of varieties covering the remainder of Transylvania, two of which are more clearly distinguished, in Crișana and Maramureș, that is, a total of five.
The traditional English pronunciation of Latin, and Classical Greek words borrowed through Latin, is the way the Latin language was traditionally pronounced by speakers of English until the early 20th century. Although this pronunciation is no longer taught in Latin classes, it is still broadly used in the fields of biology, law, and medicine.
Finnish is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland. In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli are official minority languages. The Kven language, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian counties Troms and Finnmark by a minority group of Finnish descent.
Totoiana ("Totoian"), also known as the "Totoian language" or the "inverted language", is a speech form used in the village of Totoi in Alba County, Romania. It is unique to the village and not spoken in the other villages that form part of the commune of Sântimbru, to which Totoi belongs. Totoiana was created with the purpose of being unintelligible for normal Romanian speakers, although its origins or the reason why this would be needed are unknown. It has been said that, since the inhabitants of Totoi were good wood artisans who traded with their products, Totoiana could have been created so that other merchants could not understand them. However, George Cadar, a member of the Romanian Association of Semiotic Studies, claims to have recorded a similar form of speech far from Alba County, although he did not elaborate on this. Some also say it was created by servants so that their boyar employers in the nobility class could not understand them.