Who Put the “Pig” in Pig Latin?

Anyone that has watched, or still does watch, the short comedy films of the Three Stooges is very familiar with pig Latin. The Stooges used pig Latin all the time and what they did was take the consonant from the beginning of the word, put it at the end of the word, and the stick the tag “-ay” at the end of it. So the word “car” would become “ar-cay” in pig Latin. It was fun to watch the Stooges speaking in a strange language and it is also a fun game to create words in pig Latin and then try and speak at your regular speaking speed to someone else in pig Latin. The trick is finding someone else who can speak and understand pig Latin. But what really was pig Latin and how did it become so popular throughout the years? The term “pig Latin” is very familiar to most people but the story behind the language is one that often goes untold.

The origins of pig Latin are not very widely known. Pig Latin has nothing to do with pigs and nothing at all to do with Latin. It is a children’s game devised as a play on the English language and a fun way for children to communicate. If a person gets very good at pig Latin, and can find others to communicate with, they are able to communicate in public without worrying if their conversation is overheard. If someone does hear them they probably would not understand it, unless they also spoke pig Latin. Pig Latin is popular among parents who want to be able to communicate with each other with the children around but do not want the children to understand what they are saying. Some parents like to use the game of spelling out important words in the hopes that their children have not learned to properly spell yet.

While there are variations on the rules of pig Latin they all basically follow the rules that are outlined in the Three Stooges example. You take the first consonant of a word, put it at the end of the word, and then add “-ay” to it. In the end it sounds like you are speaking a form of Latin and that is where Latin figures into it but where pig came from and the exact origins of pig Latin are still unknown. It can be assumed that if the Three Stooges were using it in their act that pig Latin has been around for a very long time. But we may never know who started it or where it began. Maybe the Three Stooges are responsible.