The word for a TV remote is marote;
for chicken, it’s chimpken, and for the Aperol Spritz cocktail it’s app-a-ball
spitz-ee. Shrimp is swimps, hair ties are hair gigglies and
Starbucks is Starbonks.
اضافة اعلان
All of these are examples of so-called
marriage language, the weird and oftentimes embarrassing dialects people in
long-term relationships develop to communicate with their partners.
A mishmash of inside jokes
It is typically a mishmash of inside jokes
(giving friends and family members nicknames) and purposeful malapropisms
(slipping up and mispronouncing bird as birb), plus faux abbreviations (a
shower is a show show, spinach becomes spinch) and code words
for cruder terms (every couple seems to have their own word for passing gas).
Marriage language is just natural
Most people give their partner affectionate
nicknames, and as many as two-thirds of couples use romantic baby talk to
signal closeness. Marriage language is the natural extension of these
behaviors, a personalized lexicon built up between two people who have spent so
much time together that they’ve started using their own dialect.
Lilianna Wilde and Sean Kolar, musicians
and content creators from Los Angeles who have been married for almost five
years, said that their marriage language started to develop when they first
moved in together after a year of long-distance dating. First came “show show”
— Sean’s nickname for a shower. Then there was chick rotiss for a
rotisserie chicken, pantaloons for jeans and an oopsie for
a sidewalk curb.
“I think when you are with a significant
other you are so comfortable with them and you can fully be yourself and the
weird voices come out,” Kolar said.
The duo posted a video on TikTok to share
the words they’d developed and hashtagged it “#marriagelanguage.” That video,
with more than 3.6 million views, spawned a host of similar ones featuring
couples revealing their own embarrassing terms. (Who knew so many people had
their own nicknames for Starbucks?) The hashtag #marriagelanguage has since
been viewed on TikTok nearly 30 million times.
How marriage language is actually
psychological
Dr. Richard Slatcher, a behavior and brain
sciences professor at the University of Georgia, has spent the majority of his
career researching the social psychology behind close relationships, including
how language forms and is used between intimate partners. He said the
#marriagelanguage trend is really “getting at ways that we express affection
for other people.”
“I think we do this as a way to form
connections with other people,” Slatcher said. “When we do this in our intimate
relationships, it’s a sign of trust — trust that you won’t share each other’s
pet names with the world — and also a sign that our relationship is special.”
Slatcher said he is part of this
phenomenon, too. “Early in our relationship, my wife and I liked to play a lot
of Scrabble, and you know how sometimes you see a word and it just doesn’t look
right? My now-wife put down a word and I looked at it and I went, ‘“Two” is not
a word,’” he said, pronouncing “two” as if it rhymed with “toe.” “We will
probably at least once a year refer to twoe.”
He added: “In this way these words are like
a teeny, tiny little story, a symbol of a story. When I say twoe to
my wife, she knows exactly what it means.”
Idiosyncratic communication within a couple
can be an indicator of relationship satisfaction, according to one study
published in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Happier
couples are more likely to have their own dictionary of secret words and
nicknames, indicative of the exclusive bond they share.
Part of the intimacy of pet names and
marriage language is that it’s a shared secret, something meant to be revealed
only within the comfortable confines of your relationship. But for Wilde and
Kolar sharing their marriage language publicly has actually made them feel
closer to each other. Slatcher said he was not surprised. Self-disclosure, or
sharing secrets, is actually one of the most common ways people create
connections.
Though the #marriagelanguage TikTok trend
has focused primarily on couples’ vernaculars, the phenomenon of developing our
own dialects is not exclusive to romantic couples — we do it with our friends
and families, too.
“Probably another one of the earlier ones
was our word for toes, which is toezina marinas, and that comes from my
grandma,” Wilde said. “So I guess in a way our early introduction to marriage
language was bringing what we had from our own families and bringing it into
our new family.”
Slatcher said that his wife’s family had
always referred to medicine as mekkie, and that he and his wife started
using that term with their children. In this way, marriage language can
actually be passed down through generations the way other languages are.
Though couples like the Wildes may be
comfortable sharing their relationship lexicon with the world, others are less
eager. As one person put it on X, formerly known as Twitter, “Long-term
relationships are all about developing a dialect so embarrassing you’d rather
be shot than have audio of your daily conversations leak.”
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