What is Polari? The secret queer language you don't know you're speaking
euronews.comCornish and Basque are residues from a bygone era and are spoken by groups subsumed into larger nation states, but that’s not what we’re looking at today.Polari is a secret language developed on the fringes of society.
Although almost lost to history it has its fingerprints in queer culture, and the mainstream lexicon today.Let’s take a look.Unlike the minority languages we’ve covered before Polari is a sociolect; a language spoken by a particular social group, not tied to an ethnicity or nationality.“20th century London was the modern world’s biggest cultural melting pot, people from all over Europe met there,” says artist and Polari expert Jeremy Dolan.“It was used by people on the outside; thieves, prostitutes, theatre people, queer people, that kind of fairground culture.”With linguistic roots in the yiddish of Jews fleeing persecution in the Pale as well as Italian, Polari was a mongrel tongue recognisable only to those in the know.During World War II the city of London became a playground for illicit activity amid blackouts and the general chaos of war.
In this atmosphere secretive queer venues like the women-only Gateways Club opened up to cater to people taking advantage of the slipping of social norms during conflict.By the 1950s Polari was spoken predominantly - although not exclusively - in a gay community facilitated by this period who used it as a way to both identify each other and disguise themselves.“Homosexual acts were illegal, you were likely to be beaten up, attacked or arrested.
Polari could be used to protect yourself and identify yourself to other queer people,” says Dolan.“You’d drop a few words in and if they picked up on it you were away, if not they just stared back blankly.”The existence of.
