The French language, like many languages, is rich, diverse and constantly evolving.

But you’ll never find the dross to gold spectrum in any language text book; it’s all in the spoken word.

Perhaps you’ve previously come across, for instance, verlen. It’s the language within French where fou (crazy) becomes “ouf”, lourd (heavy) becomes “relou” and one is even offered a new form of public transport, as métro becomes “tromé”. The key to the upside-down verlen is hinted at by its name, an inversion of the inverse (l’envers), whereby the syllables switch their order.

But I’m going to write instead about the less well known yaourt (yoghurt).

Yoghurt is best explained in Le Péril Jeune (the English title is The Good Old Daze), an early film of Cédric Klapisch, featuring Romain Duris. It’s set in a high school in 1975, and one of the main characters, Bruno, apologetically explains yoghurt to the young assistant English teacher. He tells her that whilst he loves music, plays guitar and writes his own songs, whenever he listens to British or American songs, he can only sing along in “yaourt”. She asks, puzzled, what he means by “yaourt”, and then he demonstrates by singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’. It goes a little something like this:

“Suzanne-punan-bunan-stour-dan-aiii-flight-right… and play my voh…”

I know some people who can sing all of Billy Ray Cyrus’ ‘Achy Break Heart’, but only in yoghurt. It only applies to renditions of English language songs however, because apparently the key to it is imagining that you have your mouth full of yoghurt whilst singing.