My Kids Are Minimalist Talkers
Executive summary: My kids (as toddlers) sure make full use of just a few sounds to mean many different words — they are the ultimate minimalists in this regard!
It recently occurred to me that my kids, while usually demonstrating zero minimalist tendencies on their own accord, are more minimalist than I am in one way: their speech. You see, my daughter had her 18 month checkup not long ago, and the pediatrician asked how her speech is progressing. I proudly answered that she has 30 words, BUT with a caveat: those words use the same several sounds. These sounds are so very multifunctional! And she’s bilingual too! Here’s what they mean:
Ah ah ah: birds chirping, dogs barking (arf arf), seals barking, dolphins squeaking
Ba/Baba: bib, ball, bag, basket, bus, bench, baby, bye bye
Da/dada/dadada: dog (she actually applies this to all animals, including fish), panda, daddy, done, door, dot, light (deng in Mandarin), double dog (that’s what we call it when we see two dogs together)
Ah daaa: otter (learned on our recent trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium)
Ah jeeyaah: orange, apple (all fruits, actually)
Ga/Gaga: cake, car, rock, grass, goop (what we call Vaseline), ge (burp in Mandarin), ge ge (older brother in Mandarin), goat, cracker
Nana: nai nai (grandma in Mandarin), banana, pacifier
Mama: I used to have this one all to myself, and now I have to share the honor with … salami
Tssssss: trash, trash can
Jeeeeee: keys
Uh balla: umbrella
Aye stahhh: eye stuff (what she calls my contact lens kit when she sees it in the bathroom, but she applies the term liberally to anything on the counter, like soap)
Uh oh/uh huh: the meaning depends on the inflection. Also means tada or idk with the right hand gestures
But even before baby girl was making do with a few sounds to mean 30 things, her big brother outdid her. When he was her age, he made only one sound: kkkkkkkkkk. Everything he pointed at got a kkkkkkkkkk. He literally didn’t speak a single word until he turned 2. My parents kept insisting delayed speech is a sign of genius (the jury is still out). Normally, pediatricians would tell you to take your toddler to speech therapy if they weren’t talking by 2. But this was during the peak of COVID, when we delayed his 2-year checkup by a couple of months as we waited for the worst to blow over. By the time he did have his checkup, he’d started using normal words, so there was nothing to do. He gets the grand prize for minimalist speech. (And once he started talking, he never shut up. Can’t put the genie back in the bottle.)
He was probably saying “kkkkkkkkkk.”
Little sis is already so far ahead of big bro with her attempt at 30+ words, we won’t push her too hard to learn a vowel sound other than “a.” As with him, it’ll come in time, and she’ll probably have a word explosion eventually too. I am determined this time around to teach her Mandarin (I dropped it with my son when I was afraid he might have been delayed in talking because he was confused by two languages). So for now, 5% of our job as parents is to interpret for her, but we don’t mind because it’s pretty dang cute. <3