“Spasketti,” is a word that may sound silly or wrong to the ears of someone outside of my family. This is a word that my siblings and I grew up hearing regularly, thanks to the remnants of my stepdad’s childhood stutter. Turns out, the term for “in-house” terms like that is “familect,” and every family has one. Georgetown University linguist Cynthia Gordon spent decades studying this phenomenon.

This private language isn’t something that is passed down intentionally. Earth J Jacket, a TikTok page, explains in a post, “It might be a child’s mispronunciation that everyone kept, or a name for the TV remote no outsider would recognize.” They go on to share that Gordon “found that every family builds its own private dialect. Words rise from ordinary days, get repeated, and eventually become permanent.”

@earthjjacket Familect is the name linguists give to the private language every family invents without noticing. Think of the name for the TV remote that makes no sense to anyone else, or the mispronunciation from years ago that became permanent. Every family has at least one. Cynthia Gordon, a linguist at Georgetown University, has spent more than two decades recording how families really speak at home. Every household she studied had built its own private dialect. Most of these words begin with a child learning to talk, then get adopted by the whole house. Some last one season and disappear. Others get handed down to grandchildren like heirlooms. Linguists found these private words do quiet work.........

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