Anne Enright hasn't been the same since she had a baby a few months ago...
What used to be called baby talk is now called 'parentese.' It used to be frowned on as exceptionally silly and dangerous, but now, if you want your child to grow up to be a genius you talk iida icle baba like dis. For fifteen years we talk to our children Yes We Do! like this! Ye-ah! We say "Don't take those nasty druggy-wuggies!" We say "Don't stay too late at the dancie dancie."
Long ago, in another life, I was a media hack, chasing a story in Dublin town. It was a serious story, a complex story about corruption, graft, injustice. We were driving along, chewing it over, when my fellow hack, my co-hack, you might say, said "Oh! Look as the big GREEN bus" What can do? Nothing. We threw our fag-ends out the window and stepped on the gas.
But seriously they have studied baby-talk and pulled it apart and called it parentese and apparently it's all about vowel sounds. The three vowels ah eeh and oh are like prime colours of speech - all other vowel sounds are a mixture of these three basic ones, and these are the ones we elongate when talking to our babies.
Actually the best thing about baby-talk is the way people use it to talk about the other people in the room. They say, "Did you Mummy put you down on that dirty old ruggy-wug, ooh." They say, "Who's that big nasty man with the tight old botty-wot, doesn't like the way we talk. Isn't he a silly billy. Isn't he a silly old moo."
