#meuf

(poll at the end)

Meuf (French, verlan version)

[mœf]

Translation: "Girl", as in "girls and guys" not "girls and boys", though it's originally derived from "femme", the word for "woman". Used a lot as an interjection or expletive.

French is an Indo-European language belonging to the Romance branch originating in France, where it has 64 million speakers and is the national language. However, due to colonialism and historical popularity in Europe (language spread due to cultural, scientific and philosophical dominance and stayed an important lingua franca), French has almost 310 million speakers worldwide, although only 80 million speak it as their first language. Verlan is a specific type of French slang, in which one splits the pronounced word into two and switch their places. The word verlan is an example of this, being derived from “l’envers” which means in reverse.

Motivation: It's one of the most common and timeless words in verlan. It's a fun word because you can see in the process of being put backwards, the spelling went unrecognizable due to pronunciation being prioritized, which I think is an incredibly cool feature of slang, changing the language like that. It's also incredibly commonly used and adds a very useful nuance to the gendered words of this language, sort of an inbetween that both means girl and woman. Can also mean "girlfriend" which is useful because both "fille" and "femme" are respectively the words for "girl/daughter" and "woman/wife", but whereas "homme" doesn't mean "man/husband" and "garçon" doesn't mean "boy/son", there's "mec", the masculine equivalent of "meuf", that does mean both "guy" and "boyfriend", so pour one out for gender equality. It's also a fun word to call people like, girl what. meuf what. 10/10, common word, often overlooked, but so useful.

Bear, signed (LIBRAS, Brazilian sign language)

Translation: bear

LIBRAS is a Deaf community sign language from Brazil, which means that it’s a sign language taught in schools for deaf children. There are 630 000 users, out of which 420 000-840 000 are estimated to be Deaf. This is far from all people in Brazil with significant hearing loss, which were 9,7 million people in 2010. It is part of a language family with sign languages derived from LSF, French sign language. This is the largest sign language family as France was the first country to gather all deaf children and teach them the same sign language. Many countries, including Brazil, recruited sign teachers for their own deaf schools from France, which means they have a common origin and form a language family. Because they evolve as languages tend to do  and are influenced by local village sign languages (a group of deaf people in a community create their own sign language, common where deafness is inherited in one or a few families) or home signs (incomplete signs for a bare minimum of communication that isn’t considered a language, common where a deaf child is surrounded by only hearing people), they diverge and become separate languages. Portuguese sign language on the other hand belongs to the Swedish sign language family.

Motivation: just. look at it.