kid speak.. not directed or attacking anyone, I just want to know about it.

In RL I know a pretty fair bluegrass banjo player that talks like either a hillbilly or a redneck (you choose - in North Carolina they look down on each other) - not just on stage, but when you meet him with a beer afterwards. And he REALLY speaks with a New England accent, partly because that's where he teaches college courses and where he got his PhD. Excuse me - this isn't just a SL thing.

I was once a hairsplitting linguist for the U.S.Army, but I only find it amusing and occasionally interesting when someone fakes speech. I'm more impressed when it shows a touch of scholarship with references I only half follow (one guy had me googling on the other monitor the whole conversation to completely understand him). Now I understand that the lack of communication is just as great when someone talks over the head of everyone in the room as under. OTOH, why should my ignorance get in the way of someone else's fun? And the choice of language is a major part of communicating IMO, especially in SL and related topics outside.

Like the Aussie said (indirectly), it provides context and flavor for the comments. If we were discussing Yiffing and someone was talking with a lot of related vocabulary, it would give me context.

Now excuse me for using 'character speech", but I play a CPA in SL...

I have a BlackMoor Golfish av(gotta love Grendel's) that I use for underwater areas for the same reason. It's just so darn pretty swimming around.

*waves* I learnt Welsh for a year while I was living in Wales....though I've forgotten a lot I think. I once talked to a five year old kid in North Wales. I didn't understand a word. But that wasn't because he was a kid, that was because I had learnt Southern Welsh...
Dw i'n dod o'r Almaen yn wreiddiol...boy, my spelling sucks.

There are two reasons I use the so called child talk.

1. I want others to know that I am a child and that I am only 5 in SL. If I talked like a grown up, then most people treated me as an very short adult. Even my SL mother was shocked one day when I let her know that my internet was not working right in plane adult language. She told me that I seemed so grown up when I did not use my normal child talking.

2. As a 5 year old, I really do not know how to spell ... so I spell a lot of my words as I would sound them out. Again, I try not to over do it because I still others to understand what Im trying to say.

I wealli hope I letz you yu know whi I talkz this way. Woot .. mi secondz post here. Meg

Your #1 is a good point. Someone else here(sorry, don't remember who) said something along the same lines about using an exaggerated accent to help convey your character.

I guess the main things that throw me are inconsistency (like 'sowry', then two words later, "really". If your kid can't pronounce 'R's', that's realistic, but not if they don't keep it up all the time.) and underestimating RL kids.
I don't have any of my own, but I helped raise my nephew, and I did home daycare for over 10 years, and it's a rare kid who can't speak plainly by age 6.

5 is full of possibilities though. I remember lots to creative definitions and charming speech idiosyncrasies from those years.
Like, one little girl who liked to hear scary stories with the lights out . Or as she put it, "Tell me a jumpy story with the dark on my eyes."

/me puts this in the mental file she keeps snippets of RL child conversations that can be used inworld

At the risk of starting a fight again....

I have absolutely no issue with people rping kids, talking to each other however they wish. Of course not - their business, not mine!

But I do find it very frustrating when people combine rping a kid with running a business and expect people to decode kidspeak.

I recently looked into renting in a mall. The owner was a kid avatar. A cute one too, i might add, great look. I wanted to know some details about the mall, and she was IMing me in 100% kidspeak. I really was having issues with understanding her.

I asked her 'please can you type normally, I find this hard to understand, sorry'. Her reply was 'Me cant coz me is only five and me not no how to speek better eggyfu'

Er, five year olds DO NOT run shopping malls. When I said this she replied 'Me is weely firty fwee but me is five in second lyfe'

All I am saying is that if you want to roleplay a child ALL the time then it is odd to run a business here. If you run a business, why not just 'drop out' of character for the purpose of discussing it with customers? Surely that is just manners?

I am not saying that child avatars shouldn't run businesses! Just that there are times when roleplaying which involves speech can be really frustrating and difficult for the people you are trying to get money from, hehe

Wow... Dat would be really hard to work with, even f'r me.

Like I said.... UGH! (=_=)

Robin finished them last night, an she has them in her store as well as in the cooler in my Bay City store.

Now if only I could remember who was asking about buyin the cooler...

Thanks, Mari. I'll be there soon!

I think it is kind of a community binding thing too. Many social groups have thier own set of slang.

One examples is furies. I am not an expert on furries, but I believe that they have a unique set of language too. Some of thier words I am sure are misused by those of us having no idea of what the meaning is behind the words we are using.

Othere have pointed out Gor. Medievil RP also has a set of language that can be adopted. Which can range to mildly formal and flowery speach to speach full of thee, thou. m'lady, etc.

I don't see kid speak as any different from gansta speak, or valley girl, or any other myriad group slangs.

Bwahaha - 'eggyfu.'

Variety = spce o' life

Personally some of the strangest encounters I have had in SL were with child avatars, just because I found myself reacting exactly the way I would IRL if I encountered a child wandering around without an adult. Check my date; I have had enough time to get used to this! Yet still today I find myself asking: "is your mommy or daddy here? do you want me to call someone?" I think it is hard-wired! To their credit, all the SL children I have encountered have been quite forgiving of this.

I must confess I don't really like that shrieky and kind of creepy giggle that some child avatars use. But I don't like "yiffy!" either so I am just grumpy I guess.