I just found out that in serbian slang the "reverse" phenomenon is observed, similar in idea to the French Verlain.
now i wanted to know whether any other languages do the same?!
Serbian examples: дерПе , чкаПи: , мојНе, ћеПи , тенКре, тиЋу, шиПу, љакСе, рацКу , гуДра, вуТра , пДо
French ones: ouf, ouam, donfle, meuf, rebeu, renoi
Ex-president of the Philippines, Joseph Estrada, is often referred to by the nickname 'Erap', from the reversed spelling of 'pare' (slang for 'pal' or 'buddy'), which he picked up in his acting days.
It happens in Argentine (and perhaps other) Spanish. TTer Loscar is Carlos. A ponja is someone from Japan (Japon).
The French verlan dates back to the 1930's and made a comeback starting in the 1980's.
Verlan = l'envers
Japanese has it- my husband often says "mai-u" instead of "umai", (delicious), and a few others that I can't recall right now. Apparently a particular comedian or group of comedians started the trend with some of their catch-phrases, but I don't know how long ago.
2 -oh cool i didn't know. i'm traipsing off over to the spanish thread straight away and have them tell me some more examples.
4-that's cool too. actually i think i was just looking for a pretext to post words with the letters љ, ћ and Ћ in it, but i did get some nifty answers.
Apparently that Spanish back slang is just in tango country, Uruguay and Argentina. It's called vesre, for obvious reasons, and is part of Lunfardo, the urban slang of the rioplatense area.
The Serbian (and Croatian, Bosnian, and Macedonian) back slang is called satrovacki (missing diacritics).
The Pilipino slang noted by #1 is called Binaliktad (scroll down). Apparently with long words you just reverse the last syllable and the first. Sigariyo (cigarette) becomes yosi.
And googling around indicates that the English, in particular butchers and greengrocers, used a somewhat different form of back slang in the 1930s, pronouncing the spelling of the word backwards: yemon, dratsab, etc. That would require literacy, unlike verlan and vesre.
Used to happen a bit in the UK.
Yob is very often used although has become detached from it's backslang sense, and I've heard people use Yennom for money as Vinny says.
It was quite a major part of Polari I think.
Isn't Scouse (see [http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/content/articles/2005/01/11/voices_liverpoolaccent_feature.shtml] ) meant to use backslang, to the extent that some Merseyside Police need to be conversant in it?