![]() ![]() Whether the formalities of a work presentation for colleagues or awkward small talk on a first date, our language shifts as the context and audience change.įamilects are a part of the intimate register of language, the way we talk “backstage” with the people we are closest to. We speak differently in different settings-this is no surprise-depending on whom we’re talking to and what the purpose is. Read: The randomness of language evolution “Listening to recordings of other families is like being immersed in a different world.” “Any group of people that has extended contact over time and sees itself as distinctive is going to have some specialized uses of language,” Gordon told me. During the pandemic, we’ve spent dramatically more time in those quarters, and our in-group slang has changed accordingly.Ĭynthia Gordon, an associate linguistics professor at Georgetown University and the author of Making Meanings, Creating Family, has spent much of her working life in the strange land of family discourse. Sometimes known as familects, these invented words, pet names, in-jokes, and personal memes swirl and emerge from the mess of lives spent in close quarters. Maybe you have an old joke or a shared reference to a song. Perhaps you have a nickname from a parent that followed you into adulthood. Many of us have a secret language, the private lexicon of our home life. Now, more than a decade later, that slipup is immortalized as our own peculiar greeting to each other twice a year. My younger self nervously bungled through new vocabulary-The numbers! The animals! The months!-to wish him “iki domuz” instead of “happy birthday” ( İyi ki doğdun) while we drank like pigs in his tiny apartment outside of UCLA. Long ago, I took my first steps into adult language lessons and tried to impress my Turkish American boyfriend on his special day. Well, that last one is actually quite normal in our house. Many things were weird about it: opening presents on Zoom, my phone’s insistent photo reminders from “one year ago today” that could be mistaken for last month, my partner brightly wishing me “ iki domuz,” a Turkish phrase that literally means “two pigs.” I celebrated my second pandemic birthday recently.
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