Last year Charlie watched an episode of Teen Titans that featured the characters speaking pig latin. He was immediately obsessed with learning this “language” and has been using it regularly since. He was 6 years old and could read, so it was easy for him to pick up. I’m sure most of you are aware of how pig latin works, but here’s the basic explanation:

  • Words beginning with consonants change as follows: the word “hello” would become ello-hay, the word “duck” would become uck-day and the term “Pig Latin” would become ig-pay atin-lay.
  • Words beginning with consonant clusters change as follows: the word “switch” would become itch-sway, the word “glove” would become ove-glay and the term “fruit smoothie” would become uit-fray oothie-smay.
  • Words beginning with vowels, just add “-yay” to the end of the word: “egg” would become egg-yay. (via wikihow)

Olive wanted to learn pig latin too but not knowing how to read yet, it was much more difficult for her. She memorized simple words like o-nay and es-yay. But once she started being able to sound out words, she quickly figured out pig latin, and within a couple weeks she was having complete conversations.

Learning pig latin really helped Olive with reading because she had to:

  • figure out the first letter and sound of a word
  • figure out consonant clusters
  • figure out which letters are vowels
  • decipher and understand when others spoke Pig Latin

ADVERTISEMENT
I decided to do a little more research when writing this post and came across a paper titled, “Pig Latin and Success with Reading” about helping deaf people learn how to read. In it, the author asserts:

It seems that in the years past more children knew and practiced Pig Latin. When children learned Pig Latin(most likely from older siblings) they would speak it as a secret language, thinking their parents were unknowing of its meaning. Little did they realize that all who spoke and/or listened to the Pig Latin were practicing important language skills that benefited reading readiness.

Pig Latin involves phoneme manipulation, which can be considered the highest skill in the phonemic awareness hierarchy because it requires the prerequisite skills such as phoneme isolation, phoneme segmentation, phoneme addition, phoneme deletion, and phoneme substitution. And phonemic awareness has been often stated as the number one indicator of reading success.

So if you want an easy and fun way to get your kids into reading, teach your kids pig latin! I loved speaking it as a kid, and I’m sure your kids will too!