Parlez-vous Parisian? How to speak like a local in the French capital

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Paris

Speaking French is not enough. To function in today’s Paris, you also need to know some Parisian — a language that mixes the city’s French linguistic tics with English, Arabic and the backwards slang dialect of verlan. What follows is the briefest introductory guide.

Let’s start simply with the language that more or less remains the base of Parisian, namely French. The most important rule of conversation is to start every interaction with “Bonjour”, and in formal situations, “Bonjour monsieur/madame”. Only after both speakers have said “Bonjour” can you state your business. To omit “Bonjour” is rude and may confuse your would-be interlocutor, who needs a cue that you are about to converse.

Parisians tend to speak quietly and avoid superlatives, especially when it comes to praise: “pas mal” (“not bad”) is generally enough. Interrupting people is usually acceptable — it helps keep conversations interactive, and cuts off boring monologues. Parisians use little body language but major in facial expressions, such as the famous pout. This means you will often get someone’s gist even before they say a word.

Words expressing politeness, such as “merci”, “excusez-moi” and “s’il vous plaît”, are used less frequently than their English equivalents of “thank you”, “excuse me” and “please”. That’s because politeness is inbuilt in French through the use of the formal “vous” to address adults who are not your intimates. Having said that, the familiar “tu” form is increasingly displacing “vous”, especially in “bobo” (“bourgeois-bohemian”) Paris, including in bobo work sectors such as fashion, design and media. In bourgeois Paris (think law, finance and the seventh and 16th arrondissements), “vous” remains the norm.

Two useful if non-standard everyday expressions are the space-filler “Voilà quoi” (to end a sentence, when you have nothing more to say) and “Du coup”, which means “thus” or “as a result”, but is nowadays often used to connect two unrelated sentences, as in, “I detest my boss, du coup, where shall we have lunch?”

But contemporary Parisian ranges far beyond French. The Loi Toubon of 1994, the law limiting the use of English in France, is now honoured almost only by the bureaucracy. In other Parisian interactions, a smattering of English as well as Arabic words is useful, and almost essential among the under-40s.

Some Parisian franglais words are corporate: “le burnout”, “le brainstorming”, “la prez” (as in PowerPoint presentation), “networker” (as a verb), “une team”, “un call” or “un conf’call”, and indeed “corporate” itself. But many English words have penetrated everyday language, like “boring” (“c’est un peu boring, ça”), “bullshit” and “cute” (“mais il est trop cute”). Some English words get distorted through Frenchification: “la lose” (often spelled “la loose”) means bad luck or failure. “Dead” can be used to mean “tired”, as in English (“je suis complètement dead”), but in French it’s also used as a verb, roughly equivalent to the American phrase “to kill it”: “Tu as dead ça” means “you killed it” or “you did that with aplomb”. 

French has long drawn from Arabic and African languages. The Arabic “baraka”, meaning luck, was used in French for perhaps a century before Emmanuel Macron credited France’s football coach Didier Deschamps with possessing “baraka”. David Diop, a French novelist of Senegalese origin who won the International Booker Prize in 2021 for his novel At Night All Blood is Black (originally published in French as Frère d’âme), about Senegalese soldiers in the first world war, says: “In World War One, there were [French] words that came from Wolof and maybe from other west African languages. Today the words that enter French are very different — it’s different in every epoch.”

Since about 2000, loanwords increasingly come from north-African Arabic. They often spread through the medium of French rap, hip-hop or TV series like the marvellous new En Place. Although the Parisian banlieues (the suburbs) continue to suffer exclusion, their musicians, actors and sports stars are remaking spoken French.

The most omnipresent Arabic import may be “wesh”, an interrogative word that jumped to Parisian via French hip-hop. “Wesh kayn?” in Algerian Arabic means “What’s up?”, while “wesh rak?” is “how are you doing?” In youth Parisian, “wesh” has been adopted from Algerian Arabic to mean “yo”, “hey”, “wow” or “how’s it going?” Other common Parisian-Arabic words include:

• wallah — “I swear in Allah’s name”, generally used in Parisian without any religious overtones

• belek — careful. Eg, Belek avec mon vélo = Be careful with my bike

• miskine — pejorative for “pitiable” or “poor” person, used in Parisian as a general-purpose insult 

But the main source of enrichment of Parisian isn’t a language at all. It’s a device: reversing words. This can be done in English, too. For instance, “boy” has been reversed into “yob”, meaning a badly behaved male. But in Parisian, word reversal has been so standard for decades, or perhaps centuries, that it’s become a dialect unto itself, known as verlan — a word that itself derives from the reversal of “l’envers”, or “the opposite”. Verlan seems to have originated as a secret language for the lower orders that higher-ups couldn’t understand. 

Most Parisians except older bourgeois people sometimes use verlan, especially in informal social situations. Certain core verlan words are especially useful. “Femme” (woman) becomes “meuf” (this is not generally considered a misogynist usage), “bizarre” becomes “zarbi”, and “fou” (mad) becomes “ouf”, so that “a crazy thing” becomes “un truc de ouf”, rather than the formally correct “un truc de fou”.

Verlan can also mix with imported foreign words. The origin of the word “keufs”, for the police, is disputed, but may be a reversal of the English word “fucks”. Inevitably, Parisian has countless other words for police, including “condés” from “conde”, the Portuguese word for count, derived from Portuguese governors of African colonies.

When my teenage children speak Parisian among themselves, I sometimes find it an almost impenetrable verbal stew. In fact, it’s the ever-renewing cosmopolitan language of a cosmopolitan city that never wants to freeze into a museum.

Share your favourite examples of Parisian argot in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter

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Letters in response to this article:

Merci! Praise for your lessons in Parisian lingo / From Caroline McAslan, Kidmore End, Oxfordshire, UK

Closest I come to Parisian French is buying the FT / From Peter Breese, Paris, France