Baby Talk

as for pipi I would assume you're right about its meaning sander we have piepie

faire dodo: [go to] sleep

Faire pipi: you can guess from the sound!

faire caca: the big bowel movement.

Tuture = voiture (car).
Popo = pot (the plastic stuff used by small kids to faire caca).
Toutou = chien (dog).
Ouah(-ouah) = aboiement (barking).
Bibi = biberon (baby's bottle); 'bib' is grown-up.
Nounou = nanny.
Cui-cui = bird tweeting.
Doudou = the piece of fabric that kids like to keep at all times.
Bobo = (small) wound.

Funny : French little kidssay <vroum-vroum> like Dutch or South Africans little kids say <vroem-vroem>.

So I suppose that Germans say "wrum wrum"?

English : <vroom-vroom> ?

Actually Fr <vroum-vroum> is rarely the car, rather the sound of it.

And Welsh kids must say "frwm frwm"!

Sorry, I'll stop now.

Since when did the sound cars and animals and stuff make become their names?

=>woef-woef (afrikaans dogs bark differently than dutch ones!!) <=

Maybe..."waf waf" is mostly used,but we (the babies) also use "woef woef"
or sometimes "blaf blaf".

=>Funny : French little kidssay <vroum-vroum> like Dutch or South Africans little kids say <vroem-vroem>.<=

No,dutch babies imitate the sound of the horn/claxon not the car itself.

However,Ive noticed that if the children talk that way,the parents begin talking the same way....like this:

Heb jij poeppie in je broekkie!? (In dutch it rhimes)
it means (litt.) Have you got shitty in your pants?!

Normally you would say,:Heb jij poep in je broek? (Have you got shit in your pants?!)

Do you (all the people) have that too ?

And yes, greg, cars in English make the sound "vroom" (that is, /vrum/) as a whole.

Yeah, in English tend to add "ee" sounds at the end.

Chinese, as far as I can tell, doubles sounds, or for names -- puts "xiao" (small) in front of them.

Cat "mao" -> kitty "maomao"

In the Philippines, children's nicknames are doubled to make them diminutive:
Tin-Tin (Christian, Christina, Catherine), Top-Top (Christopher), Jun-Jun (Jun, Junior), Ann-Ann (Anna, Marianne), Let-Let (Leticia), etc.

We also seem to have an affinity for nicknames ending with "ng": Bong-Bong, Peping, Jing-Jing, Ling-Ling, etc.

We also address our elders with repetitive sounds and continue to do so into adulthood:

father - tatay; mother - nanay; grandfather/grandmother - lolo/lola; uncle/aunt - tito/tita; godfather/godmother - ninong/ninang

…and body parts (particularly the private bits):

armpit - kili-kili; breast - dede, suso; penis - titi; vagina - pek-pek, kiki

In west Flemish we say :

DODO - SLEEP
TUTTE/FUTTE - SUCKER ( for a baby )
GABBE - CUTWOUND
SCHETJE - FART
PUF - BURP

Andre,

does Afrikaans have more words besides "slapies" that add -ies for diminutives? That seems like the English "walkies" for dog-walks, that I mentioned earlier. As for the Dutch "waf-waf" and the S.A. "woef-woef", I guess S.A. has bigger dogs.

Greg,

I had a ballet teacher from Paris who used "popo" to mean "butt". Is that still used in France? Actually, he was from Holland originally, so maybe that Dutch usage, but he moved to Paris in his teens to study ballet, and I always assumed that he'd be using a French word in connection with ballet, I don't know why.

bobo = wound. In the US, we call a wound a boo-boo. But a boo-boo is also a mistake.

As for using the sound an animal makes as baby talk for the name of the animal, the only ones I've heard in the US are woof-woof for a dog and moo-moo for a cow, but they may have been only isolated incidents.

I was hoping to get some Slavic input here. The only Russian diminutives I know about are formed with the endings -ka, -enka and -ushka.

I have a friend whose parents are from (former) Yuguslavia, but I don't know which part. Her parents' nickname for her was Tsitsi, which means kitten or kitty, and her husband (American) got in the habit of calling her that. But they found out eventually that in some other Slavic country (again, I don't remember which), tsitsi means "tits". They found this out when their new acquaintance would laugh every time he heard her nickname.