Bengali Baby Talk

Abstract

Baby talk is viewed here as a special form of speech with particular roles in socialization, language acquisition, and cultural transmission. This study attempts to identify the phonological, syntactic, and lexical features of Bengali baby talk in the context of its function as an indicator of social roles such as age, sex, and kinship. In addition to its occurrence in speech, baby talk is found in well-known, much used nursery rhymes sung to babies. Baby talk items in domains like food, games, animals, and so on, are employed predominantly by the female members of the community. Reciprocal kinship terms, however, are employed by both the male and the female relatives as well as by nonrelatives—and the use of these reciprocal terms often continues throughout life. The dominance of the male culture is reflected in the phenomenon that, while female children are occasionally addressed by male kinship terms, male children are almost never addressed by female kinship terms.