Speech styles and secret languages among children in a miskitu village

Abstract

This article considers material from Kakabila, a village on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast, where differences between adults and children, as these categories are locally imagined, find unusually clear expression in various forms of linguistic performance. Three closely linked speech registers known as respect, bad joke and shame, and Anglo Miskitu bilingualism, are examined; first in terms of their roles in processes of social reproduction and then in terms of children’s perspectives on these processes. Children's understandings of these phenomena are also considered in terms of a children’s game called Prinkel in de Sasa, and Gibberish, a collection of secret languages used exclusively by children. Both Prinkel in de Sasa and Gibberish, it is argued, allow children, through play, to understand more comprehensively the politics of social reproduction as these are mediated through language.