Everyday Magic: Child
Languages in Canadian Literature (University of British Columbia Press, 1991).
Child language is a subject in which
everyone is an expert. All parents study their children's language carefully, if
undeliberately, and every family has its precious memories of the unique verbal
improvisations of childhood. For writers who continually struggle with and revel in
the mysteries of language, the language of children holds a special attraction.
Everyday Magic looks at the
way Canadian writers have written through as distinct from for or about,
children, at the ways they have used "child language" and children's modes of
perception to achieve various literary effects. It describes how texts might be
shaped by child usage and speculates that adult artists often find themselves surprised
and informed by the child language they seek to create.
Ricou examines how the distinctive
features of child language described by psycholinguists intersect with the written
languages used by writers to suggest, not only child language, but also the way a child
sees and organizes an understanding the world. The book's subtitle, putting the term
"child language" into the plural, points out that not one, but many different
written interpretations of the child's perspective are possible.
