The Argot of an Orphans' Home

Abstract

RECENTLY I worked for a year on the campus of a large home for orphans. The presence of over a thousand inmates, with adults in the ratio of about one to ten, resulted in the children's forming their own public opinion and to some extent, their own slang and language customs. Their pronunciation, for example, is unusually homogeneous. That of children from regions with distinct speech peculiarities soon conforms almost entirely to the pronunciation common to the group, even in the case of youngsters who come very little before high school age. On the other hand, their mothers, many of whom are employed on the campus, retain their southern, midwestern, western, New England, Canadian, and even English pronunciation through years of residence at the home. In fact, there are so few real peculiarities in their speech, either individually and as a group, except in slang (and spelling) that the few that do exist are so obscure as to be commonly overlooked. I found, for example, that no one could explain, nor had even observed a peculiar pronunciation among the children, of -n't followed by y consonant, as in can't you. Instead of the usual elision, especially common to children, cancha, these youngsters nearly always nasalized the -n, dropped the t, stopped the breath completely for a fraction of a second, and then pronounced the you fully and clearly. One encounters this or a similar pronunciation among adults who are nice about their speech, but the custom among a thousand carefree children remains a mystery. Inquiry revealed no instructor who had attempted the elimination of the cancha, doncha pronunciation, even if such attempt could possibly have been adequate to produce the effect. It seems to be a childish affectation spread by imitation.