The rise and fall of Polari, the secret language of the queer community

By Madeleine Higgins

Have you ever used the slang words “camp”, “shade”, or “tea”? If you have, you’re at least somewhat familiar with “Polari”, the language of British gay men of the 1940s and 50s.  Calling it a “language” is a bit of an exaggeration—most linguistic experts would refer to Polari (also spelled Palari, Palare, Parlaree) as a lexicon, meaning it’s more of a shared vocabulary than a distinct language. 

Polari’s roots are incredibly varied. Polari’s earliest form, “Parlyaree”, took largely from Italian and was used as a common tongue between Mediterranean sailors as early as the 1600s. That’s where Latin-esque Polari words like “bona” (meaning “good”) and “vada” (meaning “see”) emerged. Parlyaree was associated with all sorts of people on the outskirts of society, including circus performers, sailors, sex workers, buskers, and Romani people. 

Parlyaree made its way to Britain through the ports, where it was supplemented with French and Yiddish. It also took from Cockney rhyming slang practices like backslang, which involved pronouncing words backwards, and rhyming slang, which involved replacing words with their rhymes. Parlyaree also merged with Cant, a slang lexicon most commonly associated with criminals. By the 1800s, the vocabulary of Parlyaree was increasingly being used by people in the theater and music hall subculture of the British West End, where it was further developed by gay performers and drag queens until it reached its final form.

Polari reached its height in the 1940s and 50s, when there was both a growing gay subculture and a crackdown on the gay community by law enforcement. It was often used as a way to secretly signal one’s sexual identity and communicate with other gay people without anyone noticing—a lot of Polari would be almost totally incoherent to those not in the know – for instance, a sentence like “bona to vada your jolly old eek” would probably sound like gibberish to non-speakers.

Polari shaped the customs and needs of those using it; it often involved heavy amounts of sarcasm and innuendo, which helped to keep communication about queerness under the radar, as irony and sarcasm were becoming a key element of queer culture. There were lots of gender-related terms and words for body parts. There were also an abundance of words to describe the police, for instance, “Lilly Law”, which makes sense given the fact that being arrested and charged under anti-sodomy laws was a real fear for gay people in Britain at the time.

Polari entered the mainstream in the 1960s with the radio television show Round the Horne. It was used by the characters Julian and Sandy, theater performers who were heavily coded to be gay. However, by this point, Polari was already falling out of fashion—some argue that the show assisted in its downfall, that it had in a way spoiled the secret of Polari to the wider world. There were other reasons, though: some members of the younger generation of the gay community thought of Polari as a relic from a repressive time, especially when the anti-homosexuality law was repealed in 1967. There was also a thought at the time that Polari slang and the over-the-top, “camp” culture that went with it should be turned away from as gay people sought mainstream acceptance. However, I believe that a large part of the shrinking use of Polari may just be because slang falls out of fashion—old words that were once fresh become overdone and untrendy.

But there are still traces of Polari all over our speech—I mentioned a few at the top of this post, but there are so many more: “zhuzh”, “naff”, “dish” (as in a strapping gentleman, not a bowl), “butch”, and “femme” all come from the Polari speakers of the 1940s and 50s. So, when you find yourself using a piece of Polari slang, spare a thought for its storied past and fascinating linguistic origins!