Guide to Baby Talk

Principles

There are two primary goals of baby talk. 1) to look cute and 2) to make it more difficult to convey complicated thoughts, and thus lead to frustration (making the baby look even more cute!). Because of this, this guide will use 2 primary principles to determine the more concrete rules and examples. First, words should be softened and the range of sounds reduced. Second, word choice should be limited and grammer not strictly followed. If you remember these principles, the rest should come naturally.

Grammer changes

These changes are mostly informed by the actual broken grammer of toddlers and young children. However not all of these have an exact match.

Drop all aricles

Articles are words like “a”, “the”, and so on.

Minimal use of first person

It takes a while for children to learn how to use the first person, so unless your target regression is ~3 years old, I’d suggest limiting first person to when it’s the only thing that would work.

“and” seperated lists

Instead of adding commas between list items while typing or pauses while speaking, use “and” or “or” between each element. Also, limit lists to about 4 or 5 at the most.

Emphatic repetition

This is repeating adverbs/adjective instead of using words like “very” or “a lot”. For example “very large bottle” becomes “big big baba”.

Pronunciation/spelling changes

The most simple (and most common) method of speaking more like a baby is to soften your pronunciation.

“W” reduction

The is reducing “r” and “l” sounds to a “wuh” sound. For exmaple: “crib” ⟹ “cwib”

s-sluring

This is turing “s” sounds into “sh” sounds. For exmaple: “yes” ⟹ “yesh”

“th”-“f” reduction

The “th” sounds are actually pretty hard to make if you’re not used to them, so babies will often reduce it to a “f” or “v” sound.

Plosive-fricative reduction

Plosives (sounds like “p”, “t”, “d”, and so on) take a lot of mouth strength (or near impossible with a paci!) so they’re usually reduced to the closes fricative (sounds like “f”, “v”, etc.). Note that “t” and “d” are fairly common for older babies and toddlers, though, so making this reduction inconsistent is fine. Examples:

  • “day” ⟹ “fay”

Word changes

This is changing words out for others in a more extreme way than just minor changes in pronunciation.

Doubled-sylable reduction

This is exchanging one word with another that is only two of the same short (typically two-letter) sylable. For example:

  • Mommy ⟹ Mama
  • Bottle ⟹ Baba
  • Baby ⟹ Baba

It’s fine if your baby talk has collisions with this. Typically, this should be used for nouns that a baby would learn about very quickly.