Spell the sound.

The child has a hundred languages, a hundred hands, a hundred thoughts, a hundred ways of thinking, of playing, of speaking. A hundred always a hundred ways of listening, of marveling, of loving. A hundred worlds to discover, to invent, to dream.

Loris Malaguzzi, trans. Lella Gandini

We learn language by hearing it, sharing it, passing it back and forth, modifying as we go, and adding things along the way. PIJIN was made to be a word game that embodied that motion. While the ever-changing spirit of language has vexed grammarians and philosophers since the arrival of the Greek alphabet, almost every native speaker who learns to read and write experiences the gap between the written word and the spoken word. That philosophical problem is repeated in a very practical way in nearly every child's development.

As children acquire language, they gather the vivid sensations of life into flexible, overflowing expressions. They show incredible powers of language invention and imagination. And yet, too often, that creativity gets tangled up: although it ought to expand along with language skills, vocabulary, and cultural mastery, it can contract and wither as children grow older. Malaguzzi's "The Hundred Languages" names this beautifully and sharply, arguing that school and culture separate the head from the body and tell the child to think without hands, do without head, listen and not speak. Of the child's hundred languages, they steal ninety-nine.

My point is that the distance between written language and spoken language tends to grow as we get older. But there are schools of thought, including constructionist and embodied approaches to learning, that underscore the importance of language's physicality: the way pronunciation, gesture, touch, and action participate in meaning. PIJIN was made as a leisurely way back into that more physical experience of language.

It is also gratifying, and often funny, to play a game where everyone agrees to let go of "proper spelling" and work with everyday idioms, pronunciations, accents, invented words, slang, dialects, pidgins, patois, creole, regional speech, fantasy languages, and the quick alterations that show up in messages, chats, texts, and speech. At their best, those changes make written language feel more alive. They give it some of the rapid mutability that spoken language already has.

As for the word games that already exist, what does it mean that so many rely on official written lists of words? Can a game designed around an authoritative list ever fully catch up with, or engage, our lived experience of speech?

I felt there was something missing in several of the word games I love. PIJIN was created to solve two problems: first, the emphasis on memorized trick words that rarely occur in daily speech, such as obscure two-letter words or unusual q and z words; and second, the ban on improvised sayings, idiomatic expressions, dialects, accents, and made-up language. I also wanted a word game that could move faster and be played in shorter stretches. So I created PIJIN.