Your Family Invented Its Own Language. Linguists Have a Word for That.
You know the phrase. The one you'd have to explain for five minutes to anyone outside your household. The word that started as a joke or a mispronunciation and somehow became permanent vocabulary. Linguists call it a familect, and if you love words, this concept is going to delight you.
Two Terms Worth Knowing
Start here: every person has an idiolect. That's the technical term for the unique way you as an individual use language. Your word choices, your accent, the phrases that have stuck to you for reasons you can no longer explain. Nobody else has the exact same one.
But families do something more interesting. They build a shared vocabulary that belongs to the whole household. Researcher Bent Sondergaard gave this a name in 1991, writing about speech in multilingual homes and using the term familylect. What may be the earliest academic use of the word appears in that paper (abstract only; we'll get to that). Sociolinguist Cynthia Gordon at Georgetown University developed the concept further, publishing the 2009 book Making Meanings, Creating Family. By the time the NY Times ran a piece on familects, written by Nitsuh Abebe, the media had trimmed the word from familylect to familect. Gordon's original spelling lost a syllable. The word gained an audience. Fair trade, probably.
What Ends Up in a Familect
Anything can become familect material. A mispronunciation that outlasted the correction. A word from a grandparent's first language that got absorbed without quite being translated. A cultural reference pressed into full-time service as a verb.
Consider some of the examples that surface in coverage of familects. The Amharic word እንዴ (endae) is an expression of incredulity with no clean English equivalent. It travels with families and does the job nothing else does quite right. Then there's the Buddhist invocation 관세음보살 (gwanseeumbosal), meaning Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, with 보살 (bosal) tracing back to the Middle Chinese 菩薩 (bu sat) for "bodhisattva." And Laika, the Soviet space-dog, whose name has been repurposed as vocabulary for something else entirely in at least one household.
These aren't contrived examples. They're real words doing real work in real families, completely invisible to anyone outside them.
A Word About the Word
Sondergaard's original 1991 paper is paywalled. You can read the abstract. That's it. Welcome to academic publishing, where the research that explains how humans talk to each other is locked behind a paywall most humans can't access.
But familylect did what good words do: it escaped. Cynthia Gordon used it in 2009. Journalists clipped it. Now it's in the NY Times. The word about family language behaved exactly like family language, spreading through context and use until it belonged somewhere new.
There's a satisfying recursion there.
You're Already Doing This
If you're reading a word game site, you already think about language more than most people do. Here's something worth actually sitting with: your household is its own ongoing linguistic experiment.
The idiolects of everyone who lives there are constantly bumping into each other, borrowing and lending and occasionally inventing. A kid mishears something and the mishearing sticks. A phrase from a movie becomes the only right way to describe a specific situation. A word from another language fills a gap nothing English has quite covered.
You didn't plan any of it. It happened because language is what people do together.
Now you have the word for it. Use it at dinner tonight. See if anyone knows what you mean. If they do, congratulations: it just entered your familect.
Source: Languagehat