In English we got Pig Latin. (You take the initial sound move it to the end and at an ‘-ay’ after that.)
In Modern Hebrew you got your “B-Language” where you add a B sound (someplace, I don;t speak Hebrew).
What other languages have similar pidgins? Has anyone studied them? (Which leads to the question of “Why?” I suppose.)
OH oh, here is a discussiion of B-language in English as well as:
Swedish has rövarspråket
Singapore Chinese has “F Language” (Same rules as B Language it seems
Malay has the same thing with “Fu”
anything else?
Yes, there has been serious study of “secret languages” as they’re usually called. People who study children’s folklore (subcategory: folk speech) and linguists both study them, for different reasons. The classic place to start is Iona and Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, which has a few pages, but I’d also recommend Simon Bronner’s American Children’s Folklore. The Opies list categories:
rhyming slang / crooks’ language [using phrases based on rhymed words to disguise speech]
back slang / Pig Latin [moving the inital sound to the end with added vowels]
pidgin English / double talk [inserting sounds within words]
Bronner gives examples: Pig Latin, Bop Talk, G-Talk, Egg-Talk, Barracuda.
There’s also, I suppose, twin languages.
There’s also the izzle that I first heard in 1981 song Double dutch bus.
Didn’t one of the “Fat Albert” Characters talk in B-language? I thought he just had a speech impediment, or really big floppy lips that made him talk like that.
Those aren’t pidgins. A pidgin is a simplified language that develops between people who need to communicate across a language barrier.
I know. Thank you.
I’m torn. You’re doing exactly what I do when I jump down people’s throats for using “myth” to mean “something untrue,” abusing the technical academic definition for their cheap and lazy vernacular thrills.
Children’s pidgins are known as such, and have been for over half a century. The Opies published their book in the 1950s. Nobody thinks they are the same thing as true pidgins, the sorts that linguists talk about, but at some point somebody must have made a connection, and the name sticks.
Children’s pidgin <does not equal> pidgin, but it’s still a perfectly appropriate term to use for the things the OP is talking about.
Yeah, but since I did not know that …
On the other hand, no touch, no foul. What other languages have these things? I suspect Spanish does not, but I eagerly await Nava.
Wikipedia has a nice list.
They are called ludlings and they are exceedingly common. Linguists love them because, despite being “children’s games”, they follow all kinds of formal rules on formation, insertion, etc. Bruce Bagemihl (University of British Columbia, 1988) wrote a dissertation on ludlings called Alternate phonologies and morphologies where he classified all ludlings into four broad categories - infixing/affixing, templatic, reversing, and replacement.
Finnish doesn’t have Pig Latin, we have “Pig German” (siansaksa). Another one we have is “kontinkieli”, which works as follows:
There have been a lot of these kind of language games, some in use, some not so much. I found this website (in Finnish, sorry, but I only linked it for demonstratory purposes) which lists different “play languages”, and there’s over 40 listed.
Thank you all. Lldlings? I must have be sick that day in school. I swear Wikipedia has a list of everything.
When I was a teenager, we had a version of “bicycle,” where we inserted “eez” before every vowel sound. So “English” became “Eezengleezish.”
My friend and I used to speak this way in front of his mother, thinking that she couldn’t understand us. It was a long time before she inadvertently let us know that she understood us all along. She had spoken the same way when she was that age.
One of my Linguistics professors at UCD informed us students that all languages have children’s languages.
Fulfulde has a children’s pidgin, and people recognize that I’m speaking a children’s pidgin when I speak Pig Latin.
Wasn’t there an exclusively women’s secret language unveiled in China some time ago? Sorry, I’ve no cite.
My father talks of one called “Skid”. He was born in 1928 here in Sydney, but I don’t know whether Skid was a childhood or adulthood thing for him, so am unsure of the era.
Skid involves placing the letters “LF” after the initial vowel, and then repeating the vowel. Thus, “It’s raining cats and dogs” becomes “Ilfit’s ralfaining calfats alfand dolfogs.”
I kinda like it.
On pig latin, I hear that the same thing is done in Vietnam with the only difference being a terminal “ah” sound rather than an “ay” one.
Australian Aboriginal languages (real ones, not novelty ones) often differ between the genders. It was apparently a source of no end of mirth when the early Englishmen picked up words from women and tried to talk to the men.
Nu Shu, but it is a written language, not spoken.
I rememeber hearing some kids using a Spanish version where “chi” was inserted before every syllable.