Baby-talk project aims to boost Welsh language use

PARENTS in Wales have been asked to record the “parentese” they use when speaking to their children as part of a project to help more people learn the Welsh language.

Parentese, or baby talk, includes words that would not normally be used in conversation between two adults, usually spoken with exaggerated intonation and at a higher pitch and slower tempo than normal language.

Examples in English include “jim jams” to mean pyjamas; “bow wow” for dog; and “brum brum” for car. Common parentese phrases in Welsh include “nwm nwm” (pronounced “nom nom”) for food; “cici beis” which roughly translates to “beddy byes”; and “popo”, which refers to minor ailments like a grazed knee. Parentese can vary widely between families, but often comes from common roots in a language.

The project is being run by the National Centre for Learning Welsh and Mudiad Meithrin, which provides early years care in Welsh, as part of their “Welsh at Home” scheme. They hope that by collecting examples of parentese they can share these with parents whose mother tongue is not Welsh, and so will not be familiar with these words.

They will then be able to pass on parentese to their babies and toddlers, which should help them to learn Welsh.

Organisers believe it is the first scheme in the world to collect parentese, and it has attracted the attention of academics at Bangor University.

“For the parents not raised in Welsh who want to use Welsh at home, it helps them to learn those words you’d never be taught in a Welsh class,” says Gwenllian Lansdown Davies, the chief executive of Mudiad Meithrin.

“It’s interesting to learn new ones that you might not have used yourself.

“We want to emphasise there is no such thing as a ‘silly word’ – we want to hear them all.”