is there a language where people speak backwards?

Question

ok..let me rephrase that.
I meant are there people who speak english backwards?
cuz i heard that there are some people in france who speak french backwards,teenagers made up the language and now it's commonly used there

Answer 1

Yes, I hear the Oompa Loopas from Willy Wonka speak in a backwards tounge when they get pissed..

Answer 2

It depends on what you mean by "backwards". I went to school with a girl who was able to speak English "backwards"; she would reverse all the syllables of a word. In other words, a word like pancake would be "cakepan" and a word like simplicity would be "tyciplisim". This isn't exactly _backwards_ though, because the syllables are reversed, but not individual sounds. And I'm not sure anyone else could understand her. I suspect if you investigate more about the French language game you are talking about, it might be similar.

However, common games related to the kind that you are wondering about for English are "pig latin" and "bubble".

Answer 3

I guess we can say Jews who speak Hebrew do, at least to the majority of people. They Read from Right to left which is Backwards to most Languages. Now to them, they speak forward and we speak backwards. There are a few languages that do this not sure of all of them. Also, Hebrew would read Backwards in a Book, You start at the Back and read to the front.

Answer 4

Well, not pheonetically speaking, but word-order speaking, yes. Russian is one of them. Their nouns all have cases, there are six major cases. What these do is tell the person listening just exactly how the noun is being used and who or what it belongs to just by it's suffix. You know the "ski" on the end of some Russian words? That is usually an adjective-type ending.

Anyway, the phrase for "I love you" is "Ya loobloo tebya". However, since the noun "Ya" means "I", the word "loobloo" is actually the 1st person singular of "loobeet" (which means "to love"), and tebya is the "you" noun that is receiving the action, you could say it "Tebya loobloo ya" and it would mean EXACTLY the same thing. You could even say it "Loobloo ya, tebya", or "Tebya, ya loobloo". The word order is flexible and less meaningful because each word changes to accomodate it's specific presence in the sentence.

Hope that helps,
Jon

Answer 5

You mean Verlan, French slang based on speaking French backwards, which is either based on syllables or French phonemes!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan
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It depends how you define speaking backwards, though.

One way to define it is saying that Subject Verb Object is reversed to Object Verb Subject:

I read books > Books read I.

Examples of human languages that use this way of putting things include Guarijio, Hixkaryana, and to some extent also Tapirapé.

Malayalam, is an SOV language: I books read. It's not quite backwards.

If you're interested in the direction of *writing* languages, check the website below.

Answer 6

No, you can't speak a language *backwards*! What would that even mean? Word order is backwards? Phrase order is backwards? Each word is pronounced backwards? If so, by phoneme, phone, or morpheme? It doesn't make any sense!!

*backwards*! language a speak n'tca you No,

Answer 7

Yes, in Serbian language is very popular, too. It is very common slang. They switch the syllables backwards. It is like a whole new language, though.

Answer 8

Yes, Verlan in French. The syllables of a word are pronounced backwards. So femme for ex. would be meuf.

Answer 9

Speak what backwards. Different languages set up their word structures differently.
subject-object-verb
subject-verb-object
I don't know what you would consider backwards.

Answer 10

In Spanish we have something similar to Verlan. It's called Lunfardo. Actually, Lunfardo is a bit more complex than just that, but one of its features is syllable reversal. But I don't think English has something like that.