Given the topic, it’s probably appropriate that “familect” is a made-up word. A portmanteau coinage, created by yoking together two halves of “family” and “dialects”, it describes those particular language features that evolve within families. Familects are also casually known as “kitchen table lingo”.
In this writer’s family, there are several, most originating in children’s failed attempts at actual words. In its simplest form it is just a word substitution. For example, liquid extracted from a fruit or vegetable is known around here not as “juice” but “joooooose” thanks to an ancient toddler’s iteration. It has been years since we called a cucumber a cucumber. The popular salad perennial is known within this unit as a “cucubum” due to a long-ago mispronunciation by our youngest member. The same moppet was also responsible for “beautysal”, which refers to any kind of grooming establishment, in homage to her Barbie Beauty Station, and she was the originator of the plea “No more Santa!” when any situation becomes a bit too much. This referred originally to her desperate exclamation one year at being overwhelmed by an avalanche of Christmas presents.
An older family member was wont to respond to the merest whiff of criticism by leaping in with the rhythmically felicitous command “Don’t go having a go at me” which was intended to – and frequently did – pre-empt any further censure.
Does every family have them? Probably, although the amount of familect in a family is probably an indicator of how intimate the members are in general. You need to have spent time with and understand each other well to know what your wacky new words or phrases are all about.
Like other forms of language that are specific to groups, familects serve an exclusionary function. No one outside the family would understand the significance of cucubum. Only journalists – and even then, not all of them - know that widows and orphans are varieties of words left hanging in a line on their own, and not bereaved family members.
Similarly, no one outside the medical profession, which has a wealth of euphemistic jargon, would be likely to know that “PITA” describes a patient who is a “Pain In the Arse”. To use these phrases demonstrates that you are a member of the group – or family. They function as bonding agents because you had to be there to know that “no more Santa” is about a plethora of presents rather than a death threat directed at Father Christmas.
So familects both include and exclude. They join family members in shared knowledge and they prevent others who won’t understand the familect reference from feeling like part of the group.
Sometimes this exclusiveness can extend to attempts to explain familects to outsiders, such as a reference by Substack writer Anne Helen Petersen to “a mythic ‘pooplegänger’ which is what happens when a dark double, clothed in your poop, haunts your every move”. If you happen to know exactly what that means, we would still prefer you not to tell us. Keep it in the family.
But also be proud of your familect. As English linguist Tony Thorne notes, familects “make use of the same techniques - metaphor, irony, analogy – alliteration, rhyme, assonance, reduplication - as poetry and literature”.
Used incorrectly, familects can have unfortunate social consequences, as occurred in the case, described on reddit, in which members of a family referred to the utility cupboard where vacuum cleaners, etc, are stored as the “mole hole”: “My American wife didn’t know it was a family name for it and only realised when asking a friend where her mole hole was when visiting their home”.
For more information about familects and a host of other user-friendly facts – and fictions – about the language we use every day, readers are recommended to seek out englishproject.org. It’s a commendably eccentric online endeavour that, as well as containing a host of fascinating articles about the words that come out of your mouth or across your keyboard every day, has a long-term goal of creating a real-life “visitor attraction devoted to the English language[that] will have a format that can be replicated and customised globally”.
