The Familect Edition

Steph Balzer (SB) publishes Cento, and has written a number of great WITI editions, including The Emotional Language Edition and The Archery Edition.

Steph here. I recently spent a week in Tucson with my sister and her family. I’d never noticed it before, but on this visit, I picked up on their shared dialect, and the slang words they all use that no one else does.

My brother-in-law said “de do” instead of “thank you” when speaking to one of his daughters. My sister kept calling their cats “mishmouths.” Then, one evening, she informed me she was making “Kwaj Dinner.”

“What’s Kwaj Dinner?” I asked.

“It’s pasta with broccoli, Polish sausage, and parmesan cheese,” she said. (She is not highly skilled in the kitchen. This is not a dig, because neither am I.) “I had to cook more when we lived on Kwajalein, so now that’s what we call my pasta salad.”

Why is this interesting?

Was my sister’s family the only one with a unique vocabulary? They couldn’t be. I looked into it: Turns out these hyper-localized dialects are called “familylects” or “familects,” and they’re quite common. The Washington Post recently published an article about them.

A familect is just one way families nurture intimacy and build identity. Cynthia Gordon, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, began researching the dialects of families as a graduate student 25 years ago. She would ask them to record themselves at the dinner table, in the car, performing chores, etc. She soon noticed each had distinct words or phrases, evolved through inside jokes and shared references. What’s super cool, though, is that this is an important way that kids contribute to the family culture:

A family’s dialect typically evolves through natural interactions, Gordon says, which also sets it apart from the insider lingo of other social groups that more deliberately curate their style of speaking. “With families, this tends to happen spontaneously,” she says. Some of the child-inspired facets of a familect might circulate for a while and then recede; a baby eventually outgrows a “baba.” But other words persevere and attain permanence, handed down from parents to children to grandchildren.

The Post’s article included made-up words from various contributors, along with stories of how they all originated. Maybe it’s because I like language, but I thought they were all so damn cute. While the register shift of a parent speaking baby talk can feel grating to an outsider, familect is spoken in one’s ordinary voice. The words seem charming as a result—even when you’re not in on the references.

In 2021, National Geographic also published an article on familects. It suggested that families could make a game of developing a dictionary of their own words. Then, not only would they have a permanent record, but they could document the etymology of each contribution. Kids could also witness the collaborative process of turning spoken words into letters on paper, and observe their own contributions become part of the family lexicon. (SB)