or () is

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

ian and

Lyon Lyon (Franco-Provençal: ''Liyon'') is a city in France. It is located at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Saône, to the northwest of the French Alps, southeast of Paris, north of Marseille, southwest of Geneva, Switzerland, north ...

naise

butcher A butcher is a person who may Animal slaughter, slaughter animals, dress their flesh, sell their meat, or participate within any combination of these three tasks. They may prepare standard cuts of meat and poultry for sale in retail or wholesale ...

s' ( French )

slang A slang is a vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in everyday conversation but avoided in formal writing and speech. It also often refers to the language exclusively used by the members of pa ...

, similar to Pig Latin and Verlan. It originated in the mid-19th century and was in common use until the 1950s.

Process

The word-creation process resembles that of , , and , in that existing words are camouflaged according to a set of rules. Strictly speaking, is a more rigid variety of in which the ending is obligatory. substitutes for the consonant or

consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

at the beginning of the word, or, if the word begins with an or a vowel, the second syllable; the initial consonant is then reattached to the end of the word along with a

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

particular to the

argot A cant is the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group.McArthur, T. (ed.) ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (1992) Oxford University Press It may also be called a cryptolect, argo ...

: , , , , , or in the case of louchébem, . Note that is first and foremost an

oral language A spoken language is a form of communication produced through articulate sounds or, in some cases, through manual gestures, as opposed to written language. Oral or vocal languages are those produced using the vocal tract, whereas sign languages are ...

, and spelling is usually phoneticized.

History

Despite the name, seems to have been created not by butchers, but by inmates at Brest Prison, with records dating back to 1821. Edmund Clerihew Bentley used the language as a plot point in his 1937 short story "The Old-Fashioned Apache". During the Nazi occupation was used by

ian members of the Resistance. Even today, is still well-known and used among those working at point-of-sale in the

meat Meat is animal Tissue (biology), tissue, often muscle, that is eaten as food. Humans have hunted and farmed other animals for meat since prehistory. The Neolithic Revolution allowed the domestication of vertebrates, including chickens, sheep, ...

retail Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is the sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholes ...

industry. Some words have even leaked into common, everyday use by the masses; an example is the word , meaning "eccentric".

Examples

Here are a few example Louchébem words. There is another French

called , which differs from only in the suffix that is added ( instead of ); the term is derived from ''jargon''.

Notes

Bibliography

* Marcel Schwob, '' Étude sur l’argot français''. Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1889.

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Louchebem French slang Occupational cryptolects Language games Cant languages