Every family has a secret language that binds them

FAMILYLECT AND ANECDOTES

- CAITLIN GIBSON

I’M NO longer certain of where my own faded memory ends and my father’s recollection begins, but he describes it this way: When I was a little girl - 4 or S years old - and did not want to be left alone in my room at bedtime, I would often slip out into the hallway and call to my parents downstairs. “Can you come back up,” I'd plead, “just for a little minute?”

That era of childhood is long gone, but “little minute” has remained, a fixture of our family’s insider language. “Can we talk just for a little minute?” or “I'll be there in a little minute” is understood to request or promise a fleeting, unburdensome increment of time; my dad still says it, and so do I, and now my own young kids do, too.

T always liked that this phrase stuck around, but it wasn’t until I became a parent myself that I fully grasped the power and poignancy of the language — often conceived by children — that becomes fundamental within a family’s lexicon.

As a 15-month-old, my daughter would point in awe at the moon and declare it “moot”, the vowel elongated and the “t” emphatic. “Beautiful moot tonight,” we still say - although it has been years since she learnt to pronounce the letter “n” - and for a moment, a past version of her is present with us again.

Most families have their own version of this, an intimate, group-spe-cific dialect known among linguistic experts as “familylect” or “familect”.

Cynthia Gordon, a professor in the linguistics department at Georgetown University and the author of Making Meanings, Creating Family, has spent much of her career studying this type of family discourse. (She personally prefers the term “familylect” but doesn’t mind the alternative: “As a linguist,” she says, “I describe how people use language, rather than prescribe it.”)

Gordon’s research focuses on the ways we create a sense of group-specific intimacy and identity through dialect, a human behaviour that transcends culture, nationality and language.