I was wondering what to write our first blog about and the answer came running into my bedroom shouting ‘Mama Nina door, Mama Nina door!’: Luna (Nina), my  2-year-old daughter was going out with her Mum.

A child’s acquisition of language is an astonishing thing to behold. From her earliest expressive sounds, Luna has progressed, as all children do, through a pretty ordered set of stages to where she is at the moment. Verbs are beginning to appear, and she is starting to string sentences together. Yesterday evening she picked up her toy shopping basket, adopted a very serious facial expression, and said ‘Sop!’ (shop): ‘Nina buy woin (wine)’. I told her she’d probably need some ID.

The cute mistakes children make in pronunciation are interestingly predictable. Luna can’t make any consonant clusters (‘sp’, ‘tr’ etc.), she has a marked preference for beginning words with consonants and her speech still exhibits both consonantal and vocalic harmony. This is the process whereby a word-initial consonant or vowel influences consonants and vowels later in the word. For example, she calls her best friend Ethan, ‘Deedee’. She’s got the first vowel, but the second harmonises with it. The consonant ‘th’, incidentally, is typically late-acquired in English children. She replaces it with ‘d’ (an early-acquired one) and the second consonant harmonises with that too. Her eldest sister – Xanthe – she calls ‘Nana’, and her middle sister – Zoe – is ‘Roro’. Again, both consonantal and vocalic harmony.

I’d like to think that language acquisition is as interesting for Linguistics students as it is for parents, so, if you don’t mind, I’ll blog occasionally about Luna.

Peace.