The Unexpected Joy of Speaking Backwards

One warm evening last August, my university friend Bénédicte and I were finishing dinner at her house. Both our families were there. The kids were monkeying around, the grownups sipping wine. Then, during a lull in the conversation, Béné points to her nine-year-old daughter and says: “Did I tell you? Georgia can speak backwards.”

“... backwards?” I ask, not quite getting it.

“Backwards. She’ll start from the last letter of the last word of a sentence and go from there.”

“What?” I say, leaning in.

She calls Georgia over to the adults’ table and instructs me: “Just say a short sentence.”

“Okay,” I reply, still confused. “Hello, my name is Anna.”

“Anna si enam ym olleh,” the feisty girl darts back. It comes out of her mouth just as fast as the original words came out of mine.

I pause to process the sounds she just made. It checks out. My jaw drops.

“No way,” I say.

“Yaw on,” she deadpans.

I laugh, incredulous. I turn my chair to face her and give her a challenge: “This hippopotamus is swimming.”

She plants her hands on her hips, raises her chin: challenge accepted. “Gnimmiws si sumatopoppih siht.” Our little crowd goes wild.

Every word, every sentence I throw at her, she throws right back at me in reverse, like a verbal mirror. We are giddy, in awe of this child’s skill.

“They call this phonetic reversal,” Béné explains. “She does it letter by letter, but some people do it by syllable.”

The latter sounds familiar. A form of French slang named Verlan (the reverse of “l’envers,” which means “the reverse”) reverses syllables in words. It started amongst disadvantaged youths and has now seeped through the entire population. “Merci” becomes “cimer.” French isn’t unique in this, either. Argentina’s Lunfardo, a social dialect similar to Verlan, has a subcategory called Vesre (“revés,” reverse). Reversing syllables in words is also a dialect of La Laguna, a town of the Canary Islands. “Café” becomes “feca.”

But what Georgia does is different. It’s instinctive, it’s immediate. In fact, backward speech is considered a trait that affords the "ability to spontaneously and accurately reverse words."

We asked her if she could explain how this unfolds in her brain. She said all she needs is to figure out the first letter of the first reversed word, and then it’s like she’s reading the words backwards in her mind, just as I would picture a sentence and “read” it in mine. This seems to support Psychologist Nelson Cowan's hypothesis that this requires an astonishing working memory.

A few years ago, an international team of neurolinguists wondered about this unusual gift. Understanding how brains make backward speech could be a window into how the rest of our brains make regular speech, they argued. So in a study published in 2020 , they examined the brains of two expert backward speakers. They found that they don’t just use neurological pathways in charge of phonological processes (which, simplistically put, allow us to make sense of the sounds we hear); they also use pathways responsible for visual processes (which allow us to make sense of the things we see). Speaking could be a visual thing, too.

I’d gladly spend hours listening to Georgia speak backwards. It’s hilarious, for starters. But just imagine all the situations it might be useful! And if her brain can do that, what else can it do? Right now, though, the applications of the research are unclear. The Ig Nobel committee, which rewards improbable research, agreed. So on September 14th, they awarded the aforementioned neurolinguists the Ig Nobel Prize in Communication. It was handed to them by French Nobel Prize-winning Economist Esther Duflo, who dutifully peppered her presentation speech with Verlan.