Spanfanishfa

My conversation partner and I were discussing ‘Pig Latin’. This was something that she had never heard of before. Sadly I was never very good at ‘Pig Latin’ so I had a hard time trying to explain and speak it. I asked her about any children’s language games that she may have played (or known about) in Mexico. Right away she said. “Kids used to add ‘f’ to everything.” I asked if she could give me an example. She used the Spanish word for ‘purse’ which is ‘bolsa’ she said that with this ‘f’ ‘bolsa’ is ‘bolfolsafa’.
We took a sentence from a pervious conversation (Tu quieres aqua; You want water) and put it into this ‘F Language’, and I sat there for a while trying to wrap my poor brain around the Spanish with the added ‘f’s.
‘You want water’ came out something like:
tufu quifieferefes gufuafarafa.

What is being done is an addition of an ‘f’ and a repeat of a vowel after each syllable. This language game did not have a name, the kids used to simply say, “Lets speak with the ‘f’”

She also told me about a language that she preferred over the ‘F Language’. This also did not have a name, but it was a language game that she used to play with her cousin. She never heard anyone else use this “language”, she felt that maybe her cousin had just made it up.

The game is: replace all of the vowels with ‘i’, which has the same sound as the English ‘e’.

Using the same ‘bolsa’ and ‘Tu quieres aqua’ we find this language looking a lot like this:

‘Bolsa’ = ‘Bilsi’
‘Tu quieres aqua’ = ‘Ti qiiris igii’

She said that this was much easier for her to do than the ‘F Language’, but she did not know anyone beside her cousin who spoke it!