French Slang and Verlan: How French People Actually Talk

French slang is the register French people use with friends: everyday words like mec (guy), pote (mate) and fric (cash), plus verlan, which flips a word's syllables (femme becomes meuf). None of it is rude. All of it belongs with the people you call tu.

The everyday slang words

The ten you will hear first, beside the textbook word they replace.

In a sentence:

• le mec dans le bus - the bloke on the bus
• C'est mon mec. - He's my boyfriend.
• J'ai pas de fric. - I'm skint.
• Allez, au boulot ! - Right, back to work!
• On bouffe où ce soir ? - Where are we eating tonight?
• Passe-moi le truc. - Pass me the thingy.

Truc is the one to learn first: it is the noun you reach for the instant the real one will not come.

Informal, not rude: who to say it to

The question with slang is never "is it polite?" but "who am I talking to?". Here is one sentence moving from textbook to street:

12

1. 1Salut, ça va ?
2. 2Bonjour, madame.

The same speaker, two registers: Salut, ça va ? (Hi, how are things?) to a friend her own age; Bonjour, madame. (Good morning, madam.) to an older stranger. Slang belongs with the first.

Slang goes with tu. Mixing registers sounds stranger than either one alone:

• Excusez-moi, monsieur, vous avez du fric ? - a formal vous with a street word: odd.
• Excusez-moi, monsieur, vous avez de l'argent ? - consistent and polite.

Verlan: words said backwards

Verlan swaps a word's syllables, and the result becomes a word of its own. The name is the demonstration: l'envers (backwards), said backwards.

Two-syllable words swap cleanly:

Other words flip more loosely. A one-syllable word usually gains an eu sound, flips, then drops its tail: femme (said fa-meu) becomes meuf. Longer words get shuffled.

Verlan works on slang too: keuf flips flic, a word that was already slang, and chanmé turns méchant (nasty) into great, the same reversal as English wicked.

• C'est ouf ! - That's mad!
• Il est trop relou. - He's so annoying.
• C'est chelou, ce truc. - That thing's weird.
• Je suis vénère. - I'm fuming.
• On va en teuf ce soir. - We're going to a party tonight.

Verlan boomed in the working-class Paris suburbs from the 1970s and is now mainstream: meuf and ouf turn up on national radio. Some older verlan, like laisse béton (forget it, from a 1977 song), now sounds dated rather than street.

Kiffer, avoir le seum, wesh: borrowed words

Not all slang is verlan. These three came into French slang from Arabic, and sit in the same register.

Kiffer is stronger than a flat aimer and heard from teenagers and forty-year-olds alike. Wesh is youth slang, and sounds forced from anyone over thirty.

Texting abbreviations

Texts have their own shorthand. The one to know is mdr, mort de rire (dead of laughing): the French lol.

Look at jsp: it shortens the spoken je sais pas, not the textbook je ne sais pas. Texting follows speech.

The grammar of spoken French

Casual French changes the grammar as well as the words, in four predictable ways:

The French negation guide covers the full ne... pas, and the French subject pronouns guide explains why on takes the il form of the verb.

Mistakes with French slang

What to do next

1. Learn truc, mec and pote first: you will hear them daily.
2. Do the drill below.
3. Pair this page with greetings and courtesies, the polite end of the same register.