Lund Language Diversity Forum Blog

by Gerd Carling

The very concept of ‘secret’ languages appears as if it is taken out of a novel. We automatically think of military codes, inmate jargons or suburban youth slang. However, cannot all languages be ‘secret’ if they represent a shared code used by a closed network and unintelligible to outsiders? This is of course true in many instances: minority languages, immigrant languages, local languages or dialects, youth jargons, or ethnolects – all these represent communication systems that can, under certain circumstances, be restricted to a closed network of speakers and not shared by outsiders. So what makes a language a ‘secret’ language? This is the topic of this blogpost.

First, a secret language is no one’s mother tongue – this is probably the most important distinction from a ‘normal’, non-secret language. Secret languages represents different types of jargons that are sustained within a closed network. Jargons are often connected to an occupation or a lifestyle, but they may also be varieties of a distinct group, that share both a life-style, an ethnicity, and a prototypical occupation. Jargons are often transferred from father to son, together with the occupation or the life-style, the purpose of which was not just to keep outsiders, but also sometimes members of the own family, outside. Secret languages of this type, connected to various occupations, are found in the Eurasian continent as well as in Africa and South America. They are often the idiom of occupations with a distinct social function, most typical occupations that are excerpted within the society but which have with a special, often low, status. In Europe there are several traditional occupational jargons, including the language of pedlars, dealers, chimney sweepers, or circus people. In pre-industrial society, various types of low-status occupations, such as the executioner’s henchman or skinners, used to have their own secret jargons. In Africa, to mention an example, we have documented secret languages among healers, skinners, and sandal flickers. A general problem of these secret languages is that they are often not written down and therefore remain a mystery.

Generally, secret languages share some common features. They do not have a grammar system of their own, like ‘normal’ languages. Their grammatical system relies on the grammar system of another language, typically the majority language of the country where the languages reside or a previous majority language. This grammar is often simplified and syntactic patterns can be replaced by pidgin-like structures, such as ignoring or reducing grammatical morphology, simplified phonology, and SVO word order. A phenomenon is to borrow the ‘appearance’ of a language, by means of stress patterns, prosody, dialectal variation and gestures, but to switch all content words, sometimes the entire lexicon. This makes secret languages more similar to mixed languages, which take the grammar from one language and the lexicon from another. The lexicon in a secret language can be taken from a language different from the grammar language, but it is often an ad hoc-conglomerate of words from various adjacent source languages. Very often, secret languages ‘distort’ their lexicon by various complex patterns of morphological transformation; for instance, they truncate words and add heavy suffixes, they reverse syllables or letters, or they add epenthetic vowels within words. The result is a language that ‘melts in’ – from distance it appear as if speaker use a native or indigenous idiom, but not one single word is understandable to the environment.

On Scandinavian soil, there are several traditional secret languages. One is the pedlars’ language, which in fact is two, one in the isolated county of Dalecarlia, Gråmål ‘grey language’ or Monsing, the main pedlars’ secret language, which during the 20th ct. transformed into a prisoners’ language. The vocabulary of Monsing is based on multiple languages. Many words are borrowed from Scandoromani, the language of the indigenous Swedish Romani speakers, other words are from Low German, Rotwelsch, the Medieval secret jargon of European outsiders, from Finnish, Russian, as well as from Swedish. Swedish loans are totally changed by linguistic distortion. Sources of Monsing go back to the 17th century and they give us a glimpse of the type of communication that Monsing speakers had. Besides communication related to their occupation, much of the content is rude, such as talk is about the farmers (who are supposed to be stupid) and in particular their wives and daughters (who are target of their sexual interest).
Even though there are no ‘real’ speakers of these languages in Sweden anymore, Monsing is still, together with Scandoromani and Knoparmoj, the secret language of chimney-sweepers, a very important source for words in the Scandinavian vernacular languages.

Example of distorted language in Monsing, the language of pedlars:

References
Carling, Gerd, Lenny Lindell & Gilbert Ambrazaitis (2014) Scandoromani. Remnants of a Mixed Language. Boston: Brill

Matras, Yaron (2009) Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.