And who is going to depict this small, spaced-out joy? Who has the language to express it?

It can be found in language of the lowest literary status, in the child’s first words, in everyday chores, in banalities and in private life, a subject matter that is ridiculed in serious literature.

– Aase Berg (transl. from Swedish by Johannes Göransson & Joyelle McSweeney)

—

In the beginning were the vowels

Eeee-aaaaah-eeeee-aaaah-aaah-oh-aaah

Then my daughter laughs

heh-ehhhh-eh-heh-heh-ha-hehhh-ehh

ah-eh-ah-eh-oh

blows raspberries

forms consonants

ehhmmmmehmm

makes animal sounds

wowwowwowwah dog

sings rowrowrowgahboat

behdahbyeweh

In Tsunami from Solaris (trans. Johannes Göransson & Joyelle McSweeney), poet Aase Berg imagines a sort of pure language that predates human society. In Berg’s vision this language was creative and non-narrative and never looked toward the future. But with time, language was harnessed, controlled, and used, particularly by men, to build and solidify power structures; war, inequality, and colonialism depended on an “instrumentalized” language.

Mothers and young children, however, recreate an original and innovative language; they speak to each other in the language of “paradisiacal madness” and through a form of communication that exists outside of hierarchies. Babble is “an overlooked path of insurgency.”

By the time my baby is twenty months of age, she converses with me:

Dahwahdowadadeeahahwahway! She claps her hands in emphasis.

You’re telling me about school? She has just returned from daycare.

Yoyastabah! Juhjuhgawah! She raises her chubby arms and flaps them like wings.

All of that happened?

She laughs. Juhwahgawah!

Juhwahgawah! You had a busy day! I laugh also.

Gahwaydahbabygoada!

You saw a baby goat?

Babygoada!

Baby yoda? I ask, though I doubt her familiarity with the character.

Yoga!

Oh, yoga. That word she knows. She even taught herself some basic poses from pictures in a baby yoga book that she often flipped through herself (a gift that did not interest me, but which she loved).

Juwahmahwahome.

Yes, we’re home now. And soon it’s time for a bath.

Toyz!

Yes, you can have toys in the bath.

Juhwahyawyayayah!

She and I giggle and gesture wildly.

While I romp in divine wildness with my daughter, I inadvertently pull her toward a more rule-driven world. I model standard English syntax. I pause in the right places, and intonate in predictable patterns. Her chaotic rhythms begin to form a more regular meter. Proponents of universal grammar, the theory credited to Noam Chomsky, would respond that the mind of an infant is not a blank slate. Our brains are predisposed to grammatical structures. I am just teasing the rules out of her. Still, I can’t help but feel I’m helping destroy the purity of her language.

**

The Human Resources department at my job recently required me to complete a survey to update my job description. Their instructions mandated certain grammatical structures: “Keep verbs in the present tense.” “Use direct objects.” “Keep sentences short.” They gave me a list of “essential function action verbs”: “administer,” “audit”, “confer,” “delegate,” “disseminate,” “evaluate,” “facilitate,” “implement,” “investigate,” “maintain,” “manage,” “recruit,” “review,” “schedule,” “solicit,” “supervise,” “train,” “verify.”

The email from HR included a link to a video of a consultant who read from PowerPoint slides:

“Write a statement of primary responsibilities using the following sentence structure: action word + subject + activities, e.g., ‘Reviews (action word) and validates (action word) transactions (HR lists this as the subject though it is actually the object) by ensuring completeness and accuracy of account balances (they label this as ‘activities’ though I would mark this as ‘object of preposition.’)’”

HR, I think, needs a writer on staff.

In the essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote of prose consisting “less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” Action + action + object. Manages + balances + budgets. Recruits + hires + candidates. Action + action + object.

**

My daughter:

oweeoweeoweeooaah

Aaawawaawaa

oobehbehbeh

Then she sings the nonsensical lines from “El burrito sabanero,” a Christmas carol in Spanish: tookeetookeetookeetookee

tookeetookeetookeetookee

tookeetookeetah

The same year he published his Dada Manifesto, Hugo Ball claimed to have invented a new genre, “verses without words, or sound poems.” He then presented his sound poetry at the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub and center for arts he had founded in Zürich. At the club, he performed “Gadji Beri Bimba,” which opens with the lines:

gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori

gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini

gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim

The Dadaists saw themselves as social revolutionaries, but the movement included few women. In an article on the women of Dada, Meredith Mendelsohn notes that Hannah Höch, a major female artist, was recognized by her male peers for “her talent at providing sandwiches.”

Yet the avant-garde drew on the language of the maternal.

Julia Kristeva saw confluence between a child’s earliest sounds and avant-garde poetry. Both forms of expression exist in what she called the semiotic, a realm she associated with the maternal. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva writes that the semiotic does not seek to produce meaning. It is a “nonexpressive totality”: an energy that originates in the pre-linguistic environment of the womb, where we have our first exposure to sound and rhythm. After birth, our communication—often with mothers as our first and most intimate interlocutors—is semiotic; infants cannot produce structured language that clearly refers to external reality. That type of meaning-making comes later—with the symbolic. The symbolic involves structure, syntax, and separation from the mother.

It is the semiotic—not the symbolic—that Kristeva associates with musicality, with madness, and with revolution in language.

**

The language of capitalism, rigid and confining, circulates everywhere and shapes our thinking. “[I]f thought corrupts language,” wrote Orwell, “language can also corrupt thought.”

Academic grant applications often refer to “deliverables,” as if intellectual contributions must always be commodified.

In the Peloton classes I take before work, instructors encourage cyclists with phrases like “Be the CEO of your life,” “Let’s go, boss,” and “I only ride with royalty.” The language is meant to motivate, but it does so by reinforcing economic hierarchies. It alienates while pretending to affirm, imposing the logic of capitalism on all areas of life—as if physical health, personal growth, and creativity must be quantified and correlated with monetary wealth.

The editor-in-chief of a literary magazine where I once worked encouraged us to share links to new issues of the journal on social media. With the goal of increasing the number of subscribers, the editor stipulated the language we should use in posts on Facebook, X (then Twitter), and other platforms. Post the link from the journal homepage and within twenty minutes of the issue going live, he advised. Include a personal narrative and use words that express emotion. Make it topical. His email referred to “social currency,” “practical value,” and “the new issue’s virality.” The value of the literary production was measured in clicks and likes that could be monetized. He promoted a language that served algorithms.

Yet language can only be used as a marketing tool when we agree on meanings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure described the relationship between the signifier (the sound pattern we voice) and the signified (the concept or object indicated) as arbitrary. We could just as easily call a tree something else as there is no logical relationship between the sound pattern and the plant. A tree is a tree because of shared conventions among English speakers.

“Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining?” asked Ball.

At age two, my daughter knows that a tree is a tree in English, but is unaware of many other linguistic conventions. We are raising her in a bilingual Spanish/English home, but when I ask her how to say polar bear in Spanish, she responds, without hesitation, bride. At times I can deduce the roots of her language. In other moments, such as with her translation of polar bear, the associations seem entirely random.

She frequently consumes languages besides Spanish and English without understanding them. She knows how to scroll through YouTube (a fact I am not proud of). Occasionally she finds videos in Korean or Portuguese or Russian and watches happily. One of her toddler friends speaks to her in a mix of babble and Turkish, another in babble and Chinese. The linguistic differences never interrupt their play. They seem not to notice that they are speaking different languages.

As I observe the multilingual babble of my daughter and her toddler friends, I wonder about the etymology of babble and Babel. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “[n]o direct connexion [between the words] can be traced.”

“Babel”: from the Akkadian word “bab-ilu,” “gateway of the gods.”

“Babel”: from the Hebrew “bālal,” “to confuse.”

In the King James Bible, the people “have all one language… nothing will be restrained from them” until God scatters and confuses them. The language of my daughter and her toddler friends is confused yet unrestrained. They are unaware of linguistic differences, of separation, of confusion.

“Babble”: from Old English “bæblian,” most likely onomatopoeic.

“Babble”: imitative of baby sounds.

A brook babbles. It does not seek to express meaning nor symbolize. The language or nonlanguage of my daughter and her friends flows. In Berg’s vision, original language was not logical; it was “a kind of happy babbling for the sake of babbling, a kind of music.”

My daughter is now three and a half, and she babbles less often. She retains, however, the power to name.

Tatdragon, she explains to me one day, is like a bear sehbeh bear plad, tap with a hose.

The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca believed in poetic facts—images irreducible to logic. In “Romancero Sonámbulo” (transl. William Bryant Logan), “Big hoarfrost stars / come with the fish of shadow / that opens the road of dawn.” Like my daughter’s tatdragon, the “fish of shadow” are a poetic fact.

My daughter says that bargyeeboak is when the water goes all the way out and down your arm.

Caquatua: you flap your wings, and you have a long tusk, like a narwhal.

Eleventeen: climb trees and then go up the trees then down the trees and then you go behind the trees slowly move behind them slowly. The etymology of eleventeen is clear but the meaning is not shared with anyone other than me.

In other contexts, the act of naming reflects or reinforces power imbalance. In Plato’s Cratylus, Hermogenes tells Socrates to accept that “whatever name you give to a thing is its right name; and if you give up that name and change it for another, the later name is no less correct than the earlier, just as we change the name of our servants.” Naming, of course, accompanies colonialism and imperialism. After arriving in the Caribbean in 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote to the Spanish monarchs proclaiming that although the Taino called their island Guanahani, he was renaming it San Salvador. In 2025, Donald Trump signed an order changing the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the Gulf of America.

In other cases, names are changed or reclaimed to address injustices, at least on a symbolic level.

Rhodesia, named for the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, became Zimbabwe, and Bombay became Mumbai.

My daughter has no concept of nations. I tell her that one set of grandparents is from Colombia, the others from South Africa; I say that her friend Nimrata went to India, that her friend Mira is Turkish, that Inés is half-Chinese. I show her on a map. All she sees are colorful shapes, not borders.

Her experience of time is still fluid. Five minutes could be five years, and next week could be this evening. She says last year when she means this morning. Last year, she tells me, my swim teacher was absent.

She does not know what money is. When she saw people giving dollar bills to drag queens at a Pride event last June, she asked for a ticket to give to the dancers.

**

With each day, my daughter’s language is becoming more comprehensible to a broader linguistic community. This development is, of course, positive and necessary; it lets her function in the world. Yet the ability to communicate in a shared language also means a loss of freedom.

At bedtime, I read to her. She likes A.A. Milne’s poem “Furry Bear.” Milne writes snew instead of snowed and friz instead of froze. The bear in the poem wears a muffle-ruff and my daughter never questions the existence of such a garment. She does not hear snew as an error.

Bloderman, my daughter announces, as if the meaning were obvious. From repeated use and context, I understand that bloderman means stand on the step stool at the kitchen sink and mix bowls of water with a big serving spoon. Bloderman means stay there as long as possible. Bloderman means make a huge mess. She created the term, and I adopt it. No bloderman, I tell her. Just wash your hands.

I sometimes read her Shel Silverstein’s poem “Put Something In.” The poem, which encourages absurdity and artistic creation, ends with the lines “Put something silly in the world / That ain’t been there before.” My daughter put bloderman in the world.

In his manifestos “Non serviam” (Latin for “I will not serve”) and “Creacionismo” (“Creationism”), Huidobro argued that poetry should not imitate external reality. Rather, poets should create a world. My hope is that my daughter will not succumb entirely to convention. My hope is that she will not live only to serve.

I want her language to develop. I want her to connect with others through shared linguistic conventions. But I also hope that she breaks rules, that she invites divine madness.

Aquaduhka, she tells me, means to wish for something.