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Many languages have a special way to talk about things (usually people) with tenderness, love, endearment, or familiarity – this is usually referred to linguistically  as the “diminutive.” A diminutive form of a word implies that something is small, cute, loved, or special.  It is often used when referring to children, but as I already said, it is also used to express love and affection, even with adults. Diminutives are also sometimes used to shorten long words or phrases in casual speech.

As in other languages, the diminutive forms of words in English usually have special suffixes. This is the type of diminutive we are going to focus on here. There are other forms of diminutives in English, one example of this is something called the sibling diminutive. This is not the focus of this post, but here are two examples of sibling diminutives in English: “movie” instead of “movie theater” and “plane” instead of “airplane.” As you can see from these two examples the sibling diminutive is just a shortened form of a word. There are many examples of this type of diminutive in English, can you think of any others?

The type of diminutive I want to focus on today is the type used to express affection or endearment. These diminutives are produced by adding special suffixes to nouns.

Here are some common suffixes used to create diminutives in English.

-y or –ie (these two are pronounced the same)
-sie, -sies or -sy
-o or -io
-s

Here are some examples of these suffixes applied to words to create diminutives.

Sally, Maggie, Bobby, Jimmy, sweetie, hottie (from the word hot, which can mean good looking)

sissy (from sis or sister), popsy (from pop – another word for dad), tootsie, halfsies (from half), itsy-bitsy (this is its own word meaning very small)

bucko (from buck another word for a guy), daddio (from dad), kiddo (from kid), Jacko

Wills, Becks, Bells, pops (from pop – another word for dad)

As you can see many of these examples are names (all the words that are capitalized). The use of diminutives to create loving nicknames is very common in English. Also did you notice that the sound expressed in writing as –ie or –y (which sound the same) is the most common way to make the diminutive in English? So, if you are thinking about trying to use the diminutive in English to communicate love, affection, or that something is small, your best bet is to add an –y to the end of the word you are talking about. It won’t work in all cases, but it works almost al the time.

Why not try using the diminutive in English sometime this week and see how it goes? Have fun with it!