Is My Toddler Speaking Dothraki?

Boo Boo has so much to say, but I don’t understand most of it yet. This remains true even though it seems like something clicked in the past week or so, and suddenly he’s saying words! In their appropriate context! 

“CHEESE!” He exclaimed when I took some cheddar out of the fridge to give to him at dinner. He said it perfectly, and so, so cutely. And he added a few claps for good measure. 

“Ot. Ot,” he’ll say when he sees us pour boiling water into our french press in the morning, making the connection between rising steam and heat.

“Tarrrrr! Tarrrrrr!” He says when we go on a walk and points to every parked car he sees. He’ll add a “Beep! Beep!” if the car is moving.

Boo Boo has been chanting “Moooommmmmmmm, moooooooom, moooooooooom” for a long time now, especially when I am in the bathroom and he wants to come in. But now he’s also say “Da Da.”

He has a habit of filching Jer-bear’s wallet, and when he sees Jer-bear’s drivers license he points to it and says, “Da da.” 

When he says it he sounds like one of those horror movie dolls with a voice box, except in lieu of the creep factor there is only a cute factor. 

But most of the time Boo Boo will have whole monologues of sound soup. Or we’ll have whole conversations where we each speak a different language. I speak English, and Boo Boo speaks his own tongue, sometimes with phonemes that approximate something in the English language, other times his dialogues will be studded with sounds that seem to derive from some other tongue.

He’ll use facial expressions and cadences borrowed from what he sees and hears from us. He’ll nod his head when he tells us stuff, widen his eyes, point in general directions–all recognizable features of human conversations. But the words are entirely his own. 

“Ich wid ow, wid ow, wid ow. Ayyyy hwa qua,” he’ll say, nodding as he holds a stick in his hand.

“You’re right, the stick did fall from the tree,” I’ll say.  

“Ooooh, hua. Hua!” He’ll say as he points out the window. 

“Yes, the tree is still outside!” I’ll say. 

A friend of ours from Germany recently said that Boo Boo does not sound like other American toddlers. 

Boo Boo hears mostly English at home, unless we read to him in Spanish. He has a number of books in Spanish. As with English, he understands a lot more words in Spanish than he can actually say, things like “Cambia la pagina!” (turn the page), “Donde esta el bebe?” (Where is the baby?) He knows perro (dog), pajaro (bird), carro (car) and bola (ball). 

The air outside our apartment is swirling with consonants and syllables and phonemes that are not English. On some blocks the lingua franca is Spanish. On others its Chinese. There is still plenty of English to be heard in the mix. 

He hears ni hau and por favor and bebe and donde esta and pasame la pelota on the playground. He probably recognizes sanft, the German word for soft, since my friend is teaching her toddler to be gentle. The toddler hears suave from her dad, who is from Argentina. 

Sometimes what Boo Boo says sounds guttural, like German or Arabic. Sometimes I swear he’s speaking straight up Dothraki, which is possible he heard in the womb, since Jer-bear was catching up on GOT in the summer of 2017, around the time when Boo Boo’s eardrums would have been developing in utero. I of course watched a few episodes with Jer-bear (I have seen many episodes at least twice)  and maybe, just maybe, the first time I felt his kick was when Daenerys was giving her rousing burn-the-world speech in Season 6. 

The kick probably definitely did not happen, but if this were a magical realism story I’d say it did. Whether it did or did not happen does not change the fact that sometimes Boo Boo sounds like he’s speaking Dothraki. 

While I can’t wait to have conversations using words we both understand, I will also miss this period in Boo Boo’s language growth. The formula of pure unadulterated desire to communicate and share, coupled with a refreshing lack of inhibition, a growing imagination plus an expanding understanding of words that are being said, coupled with a baby’s inability to actually say them, but at least try, all lead to wonderful range of sounds that I get to hear every day. Listening to Boo Boo is akin to listening to a songbird. It’s all music to my ears.