to looooooooathe babytalk?

[Babymumma]

Specificaly from mil!! She has a special voice she uses just for ds and a whole other language which includes: din-dins, tweety birdies, milky and bot-bot! grrrr, it's dinner, bird, milk and bottle. We don't use babytalk as I find it patronising and wangt him to learn to speak correctly. He has recently started to say "Ba" to our cat Bonnie which is really sweet but when mil is here she will repeatedly and very loudly say "Joseph where's Ba?Ba?Ba?Ba?". I'm sure he will find his own way of pronouncing words which is fine but if you repeat his version back to him he wont learn the correct pronounciation will he? AIBU?

My sister's friend oncedecidedshe would not speak unless she had something useful to say. Thus said nowt for about 3 days.

Bumper that's not babytalk, that's lolspeak - has your mum been spending too much time on icanhascheezburger.com?

I definitely did the tone of voice when talking to DD as a baby, but not the baby words. I do remember saying everything twice to her when she was tiny ... not sure if that's part of the whole babytalk oeuvre or just me being mad.

My sister is a SALT, she worked as a researcher with Sally Ward. She can 'baby talk' for Britain, the OP would hate her.

My dad still uses things my sister said as a baby - 'wadedoor' (which can mean close/open the door as appropriate), and when asking for something to be passed across the table our whole family reaches out a hand and says 'ah, ah, ah!' My sis is now 20.......!

"I'm a SALT and let me tell you that 'baby talk' is pretty much essential for normal language development."

How do you feel about Dads who use baby talk then Moondog? Contributing to their baby's development, or nauseating Girlymen?

Message withdrawn

Er....top blokes.

My dd (13mo) currently only communicates in "woofs", coupled with hanging onto my leg and panting when she wants something I've got to eat or drink, and the tendency to find her in the toilet shrouded in toilet roll, AIBU to suspect I have in fact raised a puppy?

What's interesting, though, is that each family will, I reckon, develop its own dialect (or idiolect?) of baby talk - so we've never said milkies, sleepies, doggies, gee gee, but do use lots of repetition, change in pitch, rhyme, singing etc, and simplified grammatical structures. So somebody else's baby talk may well sound odd or unpleasant to you, whereas your own sounds fine. I'm just guessing here - correct me if I'm wrong, moondog.

I'm trying to ease off on the parentese (isn't that what it's called) now DS is getting towards 2. I sometimes catch myself sounding like a demented Cbeebies presenter with all that modulation - then I revert to gruffness to make up for it. .

I think it's a natural/innate thing to use a sing-song voice with small children though; it seems to set them at ease.

Bumper - does she bury things in the garden? Are there suspicious yellow patches in the grass?

Have to say it only irritates me when people who Annoy me anyway use it and use totally the wrong word for things anyway. For example PIL refer to the pushchair as a trolley.....WTF? Are you going ta tas / bye byes....if any of my friends said it it wouldn't bother me but they get on my tits anyway!

Yes Habbibu. Very nicely put.

moondog - is it wrong to say things like choo-choo, gee-gee, quack-quack, woof-woof? my sister did a degree in early years and i remember her coming back after a lecture saying you shouldn't use words like this cos they are nothing like the correct word, but words like din-din, bot-bot, car-car were ok cos they were similar to the word you wanted them to learn.

oh yes ta-tah is another one the lecturer said you shouldn't use.

oh and donnies for hands, piecie for sandwich, nigh-nighs for bed/sleep, pap-pap for car, bow-oh for dog, baa-baa for sheep etc. a few more will probably come to me in a minute that she mentioned.

baby talk and repetition are essential for speech acquisition and development.

and hell fun too see their wee faces light up- i love it

I thought you used words like choo choo woof woof because the child is more likely to remember the sound than the word?

Lecturer talking through arse Nappy.

Dannies for hands and whatever that is for sandwiches(!) are different to woof woof, choo choo, etc.
If it's the sound an animal/object makes they learn, for example, 'new naw' for a fire engine, and you repeat, 'Yes, a fire engine says new naw' and they'll leanr the words in that respect.
I may be wrong though.

Kids learn a whole web of words/associations around a partic. idea/object. It's known as Semantics. The more they learn better prognosis for language.

moondog - so even the ones that are nothing like the proper words (piecie, donnies, bow-oh, gee-gee etc) are good for them?

My ds calls my sister and her boyfriend Dar (bfs names is Darren) should I also refer to them as Dar or should I be using the correct names?

Youcan do what you want. Won't generally make a jot of difference.

What age would you say to stop doing the baby talk by?