When was Verlan first used?

The difficulty in discovering the precise origins of slang words (see my post on this) applies in attempts to determine the genesis of verlan. It is highly difficult to ascertain with any certainty the exact date when verlan was first used, or to decipher why this rather odd method of syllable inversion was selected over any other method. Verlan itself is part of a larger family: the anagram. According to Marcel Schwob, the use of the anagram to disguise or cloud some meaning (particularly in a comical or dramatically ironical situation), and therefore the first literary application of this sort of ‘jeux de mots’, originates back to the 15^th Century. Schwob cites an example from Le Petit Testament by François Villon, in which a character uses tabar as an anagram of rabat, which at the time meant an overcoat. In fact, an even earlier use of this form of word rearrangement can be seen in the 12^th century author Béroul’s manuscript of the legend of Tristan et Iseut, in which the name Tristan is transformed to Tantris so that Tristan could pass unnoticed by the Queen of Ireland. (This is written in a Normand dialect, so - to my mind - cannot strictly be regarded at the earliest recorded use of Verlan in the French language, but is widely regarded as such.) This case stood alone for the next 250 years (as far as any literature known today is concerned) in its use of word transformation as a method of deceit.

However, other cases of this kind of alteration have been found, with the reason behind these metamorphoses in early literature often linked to mimicking the speech of a child or foreigner, or to fit in with contemporary speech as a stylistic feature. However, this is far from the argot verlan of today, and in order to reach the first use recorded use of oral verlan, we must progress to the 19^th Century. It is at this stage that verlan appears to take its position as the true language of deception and disguise, used by prisoners to communicate both orally and via letters without arousing suspicion. Lazare Sainéan in Les Sources De L'Argot Ancien gives an example found in a letter sent from a convict of Toulon prison to a fellow prisoner in Paris. In this letter, the convict, who signs off as ‘La Hyène’, dates the letter ‘Lontou 1842’ (rather than ‘Toulon 1842’).