Kitchen-Table Creole: A Child’s Private Language

“Daddy, I want more agua,” my toddler announces, holding up her cup. A simple sentence, one heard in countless bilingual homes. A minute later, she points to a cartoon dog on TV and declares, “He runned fast!” This one’s a common “mistake” for monolingual English-speaking kids. But what about when she looks at the family cat snoozing on the couch and says, “The gato is sleep-ando”?

That’s not quite English. It’s not quite Spanish. And it’s definitely not random. It’s something else entirely—a fleeting, fascinating, and deeply personal linguistic system bubbling up from the mind of a child. Linguists and families have many names for this: a familiolect, an idiolect, or my personal favorite, a “kitchen-table creole.” It’s a private language, forged in the unique crucible of a bilingual home, and it offers an incredible window into the human brain’s innate language-building toolkit.

More Than Just Mixing Words

First, let’s clear up a common misconception. This isn’t just “code-switching.” Code-switching is the practice of alternating between two or more languages in conversation, a skill used by fluent bilinguals all over the world. A Spanish-English speaker might say, “I’m going to the store, but primero, I need to find my keys.” They are fluently switching between two complete, established grammatical systems.

A kitchen-table creole is different. It’s not about switching between systems; it’s about building a new, hybrid system from the parts of others. The child isn’t just grabbing a Spanish word and dropping it into an English sentence. They are applying the grammatical rules of one language to the vocabulary of another, creating novel forms that don’t exist in either parent language. They are, in essence, creating a new grammar.

The Rules of the Game: Building a Private Grammar

The most telling thing about these childhood hybrid languages is that they are surprisingly consistent. They have rules. The child isn’t just randomly throwing words and endings together; they are testing hypotheses about how language works. Their “mistakes” are actually evidence of a sophisticated pattern-seeking mind at work.

Let’s look at some of the ways these private grammars are constructed:

Morphological Mashups

Morphology is the study of word formation—things like plural endings, verb tenses, and prefixes. Children creating a familiolect are masters of morphological alchemy. They might take a root word from Language A and apply a grammatical ending from Language B.

• Verb Conjugation: This is a classic. A child exposed to English and Spanish might take an English verb and apply the Spanish gerund (the “-ing” equivalent). So, “sleep” becomes “sleep-ando” instead of durmiendo, and “play” becomes “play-eando” instead of jugando. The child has correctly identified that “-ando/-iendo” is how you make a verb continuous in Spanish and has simply applied that rule to their English vocabulary.
• Plurals: Imagine a child learning English and German. They know the German word for apple is Apfel. The correct German plural is Äpfel. The child, however, might default to the more straightforward English rule and say, “I want two Apfels.” They’ve imported a German noun into an English sentence and applied the English pluralization rule.

Syntactic Blending

Syntax refers to the rules of sentence structure—the order of words. Different languages arrange sentences in different ways, and children will often experiment with these structures.

• Word Order: In English, we say “the blue house” (adjective before the noun). In French or Spanish, it’s often the other way around: la maison bleue or la casa azul (noun before the adjective). A child in an English-French home might consistently produce phrases like “the house blue” in English, directly applying French syntax to English words.
• Verb Placement: A child learning English (a Subject-Verb-Object language) and Japanese (a Subject-Object-Verb language) might say, “I cookie want.” They are using English words but following the grammatical template of Japanese (私はクッキーが欲しい – Watashi wa kukkii ga hoshii).

The Little Linguist in the High Chair

So, why does this happen? Is the child confused? Are they failing to learn both languages properly? The answer, overwhelmingly, is no.

Think of a child’s brain as a powerful linguistic processor. From birth, it’s programmed to analyze the sound patterns it hears and deduce the underlying rules of the grammar. When a monolingual child hears “walked”, “talked”, and “played”, their brain hypothesizes: “To make something happen in the past, add ‘-ed’.” This leads to “mistakes” like “I runned” or “we goed”, which aren’t mistakes at all, but signs of a brilliant generalization.

Now, imagine a bilingual child. Their brain is receiving two sets of data, two sets of grammatical rules. It performs the same task of analysis and hypothesis-testing, but with a richer, more complex dataset. The kitchen-table creole is the result of that analysis—it’s the child’s best attempt at creating a single, efficient, and logical system out of the input they’re receiving. They are trying to find the “super-rule” that governs both languages.

For a child, taking the English root “eat” and adding the Spanish past-tense ending to get “eatió” might feel more systematic than memorizing the irregular English “ate” and the Spanish comió. It’s a temporary simplification—a beautiful, logical shortcut on the path to full bilingualism.

Growing Up and Out of the Kitchen

For most children, the kitchen-table creole is a temporary phase. As they get older, attend school, and interact more with monolingual speakers of each language, their brains begin to “domain-separate.” They learn that one set of rules applies at school with their English-speaking friends, and another set applies at home with their Spanish-speaking grandparents.

The pressure to be understood by a wider community naturally prunes their hybrid grammar. “Eatió” becomes “ate” in one context and “comió” in another. The conscious and unconscious process of sorting the two languages into separate, complete systems takes over.

But the familiolect rarely vanishes completely. It often retreats into the private sphere of the family, becoming a language of intimacy and shared history. Siblings might continue using their unique hybrid words with each other well into adulthood. These words become linguistic “in-jokes”, potent symbols of a shared upbringing and a testament to the creative journey of becoming bilingual.

So, the next time you hear a child from a multilingual home produce a strange and wonderful linguistic blend, don’t rush to correct them. Listen closely. You’re not hearing a mistake. You’re getting a rare and privileged glimpse into the engine room of the human mind, witnessing a little linguist at work, building a language of their very own, one “sleep-ando” at a time.