How to talk Pig Latin?

Pig Latin has been around for 100s of years and is still popular. Pig Latin is a language game in which words in English are altered. The objective is to conceal the meaning of the words from others not familiar with the rules. The good news is the rules are not that hard. So let’s learn those simple rules and you can claim you have learned a new language!

Simple Rule 1 : For words which begin with vowel sounds or silent letter, just add “yay” to the end.

eat -> eat-yay

Gotcha : Watch out for the variation here. Instead of “yay” one can also use “way”, so that

eat -> eat-way
Simple Rule 2 : For words which begin with one or more consonants the consonants are moved to the end. After that an “ay” is added to the end of the altered word. For example

switch -> itchsway

world -> orldway

Simple Rule 3 : Break the compound words into individual word parts and apply the above rules. For example “railroad” will be broken to “rail” and “road” and the above rules will be applied individually.

railroad -> ail-ray oad-ray

Simple Rule 4 : This one is a special case that some people like to follow and others don’t, that is the treatment of “Y”. Depending on where “Y” is located different rules may apply.

If it appears first then it is treated as consonant.

York – ork-yay

The normal rules apply if “Y” is the second letter in a two letter word.

my -> y-may

If the letter “Y” comes at the end of a consonant cluster, like in the word “rhythm”, it is treated like a vowel and does not move to the end of the word.

rhythm -> ythm-rhay.

Now that you know these simple rules go ahead and try to use it whenever you can.  Try our pig latin translator to see how the normal phrases translate to pig latin. I promise you it will be lot of fun! You will end up with few thousands more neuron connections than what you have started with!

 

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