Língua do Pê

Língua do Pê, also called Língua dos Pês or the P Language, is a language game played by children and some adults in Brazil and Portugal, with related variants also recorded in Dutch, Afrikaans, and Estonian. It works by inserting an extra syllable built around the sound p into ordinary speech, which disguises everyday words as a kind of playful spoken code that outsiders find hard to follow at speed. The Wikipedia account of the game describes three related patterns: repeating a word's final syllable with a p prefix, the same pattern with an added vowel change, and, most common in Brazilian Portuguese, inserting a p-syllable before every syllable of a word rather than only at the end. Learning and using the pattern quickly enough to hold a fluent conversation is itself the game's challenge and its appeal for children practicing it. It belongs to a wider family of playful insertion languages found across the Romance-speaking world, including Jeringonza and Idioma F in Spanish, all of which use a similar syllable-insertion trick to turn ordinary talk into a shared secret code among players.