Writing believable dialogue can be really hard, especially when your character is a very young child. It can be really easy to mess it up, especially if you don’t spend a lot of time around little kids. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people making when they write dialogue for toddlers is messing up their grammar... atrociously... I’ve seen people write sentence like, “Me no want has eat that,” or, “Why you no has no that?” 

At first glance, these may seem kind of passable. After all, toddlers don’t really know how to speak English, so aren’t they going to make mistakes with their grammar? Well, yeah, of course they are, but not with every single word they speak. 

I have a niece who just turned three years old, and she and I spend a lot of time together, and we have ever since she turned two. I have never heard her say anything like either of those sentences. And it was the same way with all of my nephews when they learned to talk, and with all of the children in the daycare that I used to work for. Kids just don’t talk like that, as a general rule.

So, how would a real kid have said those same sentences? 

For the first one, honestly, my niece at three years old would say, “I don’t wanna eat that.” She won’t even include the “has to”, because she still hasn’t learned how to use it in a sentence like that one. At two years old, she might have said, “I no want that,” or “Me no want that,” or even just “No want that.”

For the second one, at three years old, my niece would say, “How come you don’t have no more?” Or “Why you don’t have no more?” At two, she might have said it as, “Why you no have?” Or “Why you no have more?”

So what is the key difference between our sample bad sentences and our revised versions of them? 

Well, for the most part, it’s the grammar. A toddler is not going to use completely wrong grammar. They might get a word or two wrong here or there, but they learn to speak by emulating the adults around them; adults don’t generally use completely wrong grammar on a consistent enough basis to mess their kid’s grammar up that badly. The toddlers’ main issue is that they forget to say some things, but generally they include all of the key pieces of the sentence to get their point across. If you notice in our sample “good” sentences, the grammar is pretty much basically right, there’s just a bunch of words that were omitted, but the KEY words came through.

Someone learning English as a second language may mix up some verb forms, twist grammatical structures around, pretty much mangle a sentence in every way possible, because they’re just stringing a bunch of words together that they’ve memorized and trying to remember which conjugation goes here, what verb form goes there... It can be a mess... But toddlers don’t understand what a “verb form” is (or even what a verb is); they just know that “if I want them to understand that, then I need to say this.”

The most important thing to remember when writing dialogue for toddlers is that toddlers aren’t stupid. They’re just tiny humans with smaller vocabularies.