Baby Talk - Examples in Literature

Examples in Literature

• The novelist Booth Tarkington, in Seventeen (1917), gives this example of baby talk, in this case, from a pet owner speaking to her dog:

...pressing her cheek to Flopit's, she changed her tone. "Izzum's ickle heart a-beatin' so floppity! Um's own mumsy make ums all right, um's p'eshus Flopit!"

• George Orwell, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), gives us another example addressed to a pet dog:

"A Peke, the ickle angel pet, wiv his gweat big soulful eyes and his ickle black nosie — oh so ducky-duck!"

• Punch, April 23, 1919, in a humorous piece purporting to pose examination questions on "the interesting language known as Bablingo", quizzes the examinee on items such as "Wasums and didums, then? Was it a ickle birdie, then?" "Did he woz-a-woz, then; a Mum's own woz-man?" and "Did she try to hit her ickle bruzzer on his nosie-posie wiz a mug? Did she want to break him up into bitsy-witsies?"
• In her New Yorker review of A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner (1928) Dorothy Parker, writing under the book reviewer pen name Constant Reader, purposefully mimics baby talk when dismissing the book's syrupy prose style: "It is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."
• In "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (2003), J. K. Rowling gives this example of baby talk, from Bellatrix Lestrange to Harry Potter: "The little baby woke up fwightened and fort what it dweamed was twoo."