Children playing in the street Turnham Green, 1891. Catalogue Ref: COPY1/406 (149) National Archives UK

There are many children’s word games, including Pig Latin, Double Dutch and G-talk. They all arise, thrive and go in and out of fashion within the restricted sub-culture of children. This is a culture of the playground and the park that is to some extent in opposition to the world of grown-ups, teachers and formal education. It is a world that is made and maintained by children for children. Adults who may cling fondly to the more romanticised images of childhood often find the expressions of this world to be shocking, which children fully intend them to be. 

After surveying children’s play and language across Britain, Iona and Peter Opie produced their classic work The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). It revealed a deep, vast and everchanging reservoir of kidspeak, resonant with creativity, colour and not a little mischief. Children from Newcastle and elsewhere used what they often called crook’s language, such as going for a ball and chalk, meaning to go for a walk and calling a thief a tea-leaf. 

The Opies were also able to report on the varieties of backslang and related language tricks played by children on each other and on parents and teachers. Kids in different places had their own names for these secret languages, such as eggy-peggy and arague. Most of these involved moving the last sound in the word to the front, so that ‘bash you if you don’t shut your trap’ was rendered as Shba uyo fi uyo tedon teshu aryou petray. 

Pig Latin, in which the initial consonants are moved to the end of the word while either ‘ay’ or sometime ‘ee’ was added, turning the same more or less standard English phrase given above into Ashbay ouyay ifay ouyay ontday utshay ouyay aptray. Other variations involved the addition of one, sometimes two syllables, before the vowel. This produced sentences like eg, known in some areas as stage slang and elsewhere as aygo-paygo language.

The Opies give a literary reference to the existence of such children’s languages at least as early as 1808. Around the same time similar language games were played by American children. One was called hog Latin and involved the addition of ‘gery’ to every word spoken. 

The lexicographer, Eric Partridge, gives examples of a children’s language called ziph, which apparently had various levels of complexity. The intermediate form, as he calls it, was a simple addition of the suffix vis to each English word, a sentence like ‘Shall we go away in an hour’ becoming Shagall wevis govis awayvis invis andvis houris? The more complex form that inserted syllables such as ga, ge, gi and go into the words. The same English sentence then becomes Shagall wege gogo agawaygay igin agan hougour? Variations on these techniques are almost endless, limited only by the creativity, playfulness and needs of their speakers.

Such word games are also known to have been played by French children in the seventeenth century. One variety known as le javanaise, was eventually picked up by adults and became a craze during the 1860s. Expatriate Trinidadian musicians in 1970s London played with another variation of this word game. They called it ‘I Y’. It consisted of adding these sounds to the start and finish of words. Multi-syllabic words could also have these sounds inserted, the overall effect being a playful obfuscation of whatever was being said.

Another form of children’s speech is the nonsense oration, a variety of the stump speeches sometimes used by adults as a form of verbal amusement. Here is an example from American tradition:

Ladies and jellyfish, I come here not to dress you or undress you, but to address you as to how Christopher Cockeyed Cucumber crossed the Missisloppi River with the Declaration of Indigestion in one hand and the Star Speckled bannaner in the other.

Another whimsy from British children, highlights the fact that the common tongues of children are not bound by national boundaries:

Ladles and jellyspoons,

I stand upon this speech to make a platform,

The train I arrived in has not yet come,

So I took a bus and walked.

I come before you to stand behind you

And tell you something I know nothing about.

It hardly needs to be said that these expressions show the familiarity of children with the adult ways of the world and their delight in sending up those ways. The Opies called such expressions ‘tangletalk’, also providing some examples in verse form:

I went to the pictures next Tuesday

And took a front seat at the back.

I said to the lady behind me,

I cannot see over your hat.

She gave me some well-broken biscuits,

I ate them and gave her them back;

I fell from the pit to the gallery

And broke my front bone at the back.

An important element of the adult world is the insult, in which skills children also serve a linguistic apprenticeship. Children also have inventive repertoires of name-calling and other insults designed to bring other children into line with whatever is considered to be the norm at any particular time or place. In Scotland children who were conceited were known as swankpots, in England as Swankypants or Swanky Liz, a porky prig and a puff bag, among other derogations. 

Moody types were cross-patches, old grousey, grumpy, misery, mardy-baby, sourpuss or sulky Sue. Unusually bright children were clever-Dicks, clever–guts, clever-pot or clever-sticks, among other half admiring, half-demeaning terms. Inquisitive children were nosey parkers, peep-eyes, flap-ears and keyhole Kates. In Australia such people are known as stickybeaks. And so it went on through cry babies, toadies, blabber-mouths, snitches and wide-mouths, just a few among the amazing number and diversity of children’s insults recorded by the Opies. 

In her collection of children’s speech from Australia, Kidspeak (2000), June Factor identified over 4500 terms used by children. These included words related to toilet functions (poo, bum), sex (a tonguey is a French kiss), insult (dweeb, dork, vege head) play (chasey, the truce term barley and its variants, names for marbles, such as cat’s eye, peewee and stonk, among many others), friends (pals, buddys, dudes) and enemies (scrags, square bears and the reviled dobber).

The languages are not only Australian-English but also varieties of Aboriginal-English, including fully-developed Creoles such as to get proper wild or angry, and gury, a Kimberley Creole for ‘greedy’. There are also words taken from the many non-English languages of the community, including Greek (malaca, an insult), Italian (putana, an insult. Factor also highlighted the sheer creativity and verbal vibrancy of childisms like snot block (vanilla slice) and over-shoulder boulder-holder (bra) as well as a few rhyming slang terms such as horse and cart for fart and backslang, as in gaff for a fag, or cigarette.