“Within a couple of decades, Verlan has spread from the peripheral housing projects of France’s poorest immigrants, heavily populated with Africans and North African Arabs, and gained widespread popularity among young people across France. It has seeped into film dialogue, advertising campaigns, French rap and hip-hop music, the mainstream media. It has even made it into some of the country’s leading dictionaries.
A language of alienation that has, paradoxically, also become a means of integration, Verlan expresses France’s love-hate relationship with its immigrant community and has begun to attract a number of scholarly studies.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Copyright P. Kerim Friedman.