Vesre

Vesre (reversing the order of syllables within a word) is one of the features of Rioplatense Spanish slang. Natives of Buenos Aires and Uruguay use vesre sparingly in colloquial speaking, and never in formal circumstances. Tango lyrics make widespread use of lunfardo and vesre to highlight the intended underworld atmosphere, or for comical relief.

Vesre is mostly from Buenos Aires, and other cities in Argentina have their own customs. Rosario has its "Rosarigasino" method for obfuscating words, and Córdoba has an entirely different set of colloquial conventions. Yet, most Argentines and Uruguayans have been exposed to vesre through tango lyrics or the media.

Even though vesre has spread to other countries, and can be heard in Peru, Chile and Ecuador, Spanish speakers outside the Río de la Plata area are usually less inclined to use it. Popular speech has created some instances; for example, natives of Barranquilla, Colombia often call their city Curramba, in a stylized form of vesre.

Examples

• revés → vesre (reverse)
• café → feca (coffee)
• caballo → llobaca (horse)
• libro → broli (book)
• amigo → gomía (friend)
• doctor → tordo (doctor, usually meaning physician but also used for lawyers. "Tordo" is also the name in Argentina of the opportunistic shiny cowbird).
• carne → nerca (meat)
• pizza → zapi
• baño → ñoba (bathroom)
• boludo → dolobu or dobolu (dumb.)
• mujer → jermu (woman; the vesre version mostly means "wife")
• pelado → dolape (bald)

Occasionally, vesre is a stepping-stone towards further obfuscation, achieved by evolving into a longer word. For example:

• coche (car) → checo → checonato (after a once-famous sportsman named Cecconatto)
• cinco (the number five) → cocín → cocinero (literally cook; used mostly on the racetrack to mean "the five horse")

The original and vesre versions of a word are not always synonyms; sometimes the reversal adds some extra nuance to the meaning. For instance, the word hotel bears the same meaning as in English (i.e. a normal tourist hotel), whereas telo implies that the establishment is actually a love hotel. Listen to examples

In other languages

Colloquial French has a form of intentional metathesis known as verlan.

Tagálog, a language of the Philippines, also has a similar construct known as binaliktad, lit. "inverted."

Serbian has a form of slang called Šatrovački followed in the 1990s with a more ambiguous slang called utrovački.

In Brazilian Portuguese from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the local version is called gualin, from lingua (tongue or language). While it is pretty straightforward, the final "s" in plurals and the final "r" for the infinitive tense of verbs are usually dropped. A typical example is: "Cevô lafá gualin?" (Você fala gualin? Do you speak gualin?).