I recently began to read Perry Gilmore’s book,
Kisisi (Our Language): The Story of Colin and Sadiki. It is a kind of autoethnography, a linguistic case study, and a memoir. In the prologue, she tells the story of his son Colin and his playmate Sadiki, a Samburu boy in Kenya, and how their unique and prosperous relationship led them to create their own private language, which was called Swahili pidgin. She says that her book is an ethnographic exploration of young children’s ability and creativity in creating their own language.
In chapter three (I skipped the first two chapters, which I might return to later), Gilmore discusses the role of play in her son Colin and Sadiki’s creative ways of communication. On page 37, she claims that the “play served as a space and a resource for the inventive verbal activities that generated their shared language." Gilmore goes into detail about how Colin and Sadiki created a lexicon for scatological artifacts, which, to some degree, was influenced by sound play and onomatopoeia. She quotes Sutton-Smith, who has suggested that play and fantasy are grounds for generating new ideas that can be used later. In the case of Colin and Sadiki, the entertainment aspect of their lives led them to linguistic invention in which the two could easily communicate.
This is interesting and I found this English-Swahili-based Creole something impressive or unique in how the author illustrates it. Creole making might be a way for kids to communicate in societies with material deprivation. And it could happen anywhere in the world where the average household consists of at least five or six people, enough army of individuals who can come up with creative ideas albeit in the group. In such an environment, rivalry among siblings is typical, and this is where children become creative. In order to compete with their siblings – even with their parents – over resources and positions, they devise new languages for communication.
I personally remember when I was very young, my brothers and I invented a language that was only accessible to us in the household. We were bitten a couple of times by older siblings and even by our parents for not speaking the language that was spoken in the house. We were accused of speaking in the language of
djinn, and they told us that we would bring curses or spell hexes on others.
Inventing creole was not unique to us, it was common among children in my village. When we were forced to quit speaking our pidgin language, we came up with a new idea.
In our clique, we decided to speak our native language, Hazaragi (a subdialect of Farsi) backward. We became so fluent that we did not see the need to switch back to normal, but when necessary.
So, the question is, why can children of third-world countries create languages of their own and children in the modern world, let’s say the Western world, cannot be that creative?
Well, the answer is very straightforward. As I mentioned earlier, the family size matters. We were eight siblings and had nothing to do at the house except fight all the time, but we never stayed inside. We left the house at the crack of dawn and returned when it was really dark. During the day, no one needed us or came after us. We used to spend most of our time playing, climbing on trees, finding food in nature, and sometimes even stealing fruits from the trees of farmers. We were out with other children in the playgrounds, on the farm and in the mountains, we were experiencing our ultimate freedom. No adult was watching us and telling us what to do and what not to do. We had nothing but to come up with something new and language was one of them. In order to be unique and keep our schemes secret, we invented language. No one was interested in our speech and when we grew up, we gave up once and for all. I can still speak my native language backward. I tried it with my sister, and she was surprised.
Gilmore’s book is interesting, especially for people who may think Colin and Sadiki’s case were unique. In fact, in the Western context, it is unique, particularly where children spend most of their time either with their parents or technological tools, and they are given very little time to spend with their peers.
I might come back to this book later.
