Bona to vada your dolly old eek

Imagine you’re a gay man living in the year 1950. Not unnaturally, you would like to meet another gay man. How to identify yourself to a potential partner? A confession might bring the police; dressing and carrying yourself in distinctive ways will invite ridicule or violence in the street. The solution is this: you casually remark to a stranger that the pub you are both in is ‘naff’. He looks up, and before you know it, you’re talking like this:

‘Pauline? Can’t swing a cat but hit a cove. She’s had nanti bully fake. Dyed her riah, her end’s a right mess.’
‘Nanti bona. I hope she vaggeried straight to the crimper.’
‘Well that’s where she’d been. The palone tried to give her an Irish. Moultee palaver.Pauline told her to shove her shyckle up her khyber.’

This is taken from Putting on the Dish, a brilliant 2015 short film recreation by ‘Brian and Karl’ of the secret speech of gay men before 1960. Known as Polari, it flourished as an initial signal between outlaws and as a method of talking intended to be unintelligible to outsiders. It is, in linguistic terms, a criminal argot, like Verlan in French; probably not quite a language, and certainly nobody ever spoke it exclusively.

Nevertheless, the ways it has reached us, in occasional performances by the now very old, don’t quite convey the extent and improvisational quality that took it well beyond a mere collection of slang terms. We know that gay men could hold long conversations in it, shaping grammar in unusual ways and creating new lexical items on the hoof. The fact is that nobody tried to describe it until it had almost died, and then most attempts amounted merely to lists of vocabulary.

It might be best not to think of it as a language, nor just as a collection of abstruse slang words, but as what linguistics calls ‘a pidgin’; a version of a language improvised for a particular functional purpose, and in time turning into a ‘creole’, or language spoken by its users from birth.