What Is Pig Latin—And What Does It Have to Do With Pigs?

Ellohay, anday elcomeway otay isthay article-ay! Wait, don’t worry, your computer isn’t broken! That’s just Pig Latin, a “language” that has been confusing—and delighting—people for centuries.

What Actually Is Pig Latin?
Why “Pig”?
Do People Still Use Pig Latin?

What Actually Is Pig Latin?

While this may sound a bit contradictory, Pig Latin isn’t Latin, and it’s also not quite a language. It’s a playful code that remixes English words so your conversation can be hidden from anyone who doesn’t know the rules.

The gist: take the first consonant (or consonant cluster) of a word, move it to the end, and tack on an “ay.” So grammar becomes ammargray, girl turns into irlgay. If a word starts with a vowel, many speakers simply add “-ay” (or sometimes “-way”) to the end.

Common Pig Latin Word/Phrase	Translation
Ellohay	“Hello”
Ixnay on the upidstay	“Nix the stupid”
Ankthay ouyay	“Thank you”
Ancay ouyay peaksay igpay atinlay?	“Can you speak Pig Latin?”
Ymay amenay isway ...	“My name is …”

Linguists will tell you that Pig Latin has all the building blocks of communication, but because it “borrows” everything from English, they classify it as a language game.

Why “Pig”?

The language game has nothing to do with pigs—so you don’t need to start oinking to use it. The moniker simply denotes that it’s a fake form of Latin. The name “Pig Latin” shows up in the 1800s, when it often meant any jokey, fake Latin. You’ll also see older cousins called “Hog Latin” or “Dog Latin,” too. Wordplay like this has been around for centuries; even Shakespeare has made a “fake Latin” joke before.

The modern flip-and-add-“ay” version took hold later and went pop-culture viral in the 1920s and ’30s. That’s when a few Pig Latin forms slipped into mainstream English and never left: ixnay (from nix) and amscray (from scram).

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Do People Still Use Pig Latin?

Yes, but mostly just for fun. Pig Latin is practically a childhood rite of passage in the United States, and there are still online translators if you’re rusty.

Beyond nostalgia, language geeks care because games like Pig Latin reveal how we mentally slice words into pieces (consonant clusters, vowels, syllables). Not everyone segments words the same way, and linguists are really interested in those variations.

And, to be fair, Pig Latin-type games aren’t limited to just English. Several languages have their own covert slang. French butchers and resistance fighters used loucherbem; Swedish has fikonspråket; Bern’s working-class German once featured Mattenenglisch, which shifts consonants and tweaks vowels in Pig Latin-ish ways.

While Pig Latin isn’t a “real language” in the formal sense, that’s sort of beside the point. The impulse is universal: make speech that’s understandable to those in the know and delightfully weird to everyone else.