My daughter has always been quite precocious. But she has me stumped. She will be 5 in November... and she has been talking well for years (non stop!). But the past few weeks we have been noticing her making up new words when she talks to us. She has a new repetoire of words replacing English words - and she inserts them insto sentences intermittently, then tells us what the word meant.

It's been going on for a few weeks and now she is trying to write a little dictionary of her new words.

Anyone else have a kid who did this?

Yes. Dagny did that a lot around 5. Now, she has written several long stories (>80 pages) within the fantasy genre, and some of the characters speak alternate languages.

Do you think I should do the writing it down and writing down usage rules she makes up, too? It just cracks me up!

oh good my DD isn't the only one! It drives me nut though because anytime she says something wrong she insists "no, that's how we say it in *my* language".

Although I have to admit that I've created a few conlangs as well so I shouldn't be terribly suprised that DD does it as well. There are whole communities of people creating alternative languages. It's really interesting & creating the rules can actually help teach the grammer rules in english as well.

Chole

Erik has made up quite a few words in "Spanish English". Some of them are consistent, sometimes it's just whatever he feels led to make up at that moment. He does it a lot.

He is also a writer, but he hasn't used SpanishEnglish in his writing yet. His stories are often very run-on.... but the longest one is 60 pages. There are some GOOD sections in there, and some where I type what he says just because, but it's really silly.

And Chloe, Erik also does that. If he says a word wrong, he'll say, "Oh, that's in SpanishEnglish"

Oh, and Erik will be 5 in November, too! He hasn't given me any grammar rules or usage rules for the words, though... I think I'd write it down, at least in my journal!

Abel does it all the time. He has a couple of new words every week, and uses them like he's been hearing them all his life.

Between that and the learning Chinese thing, I may never actually know what he's talking about !! lol