In chronic psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, sometimes the affected person develops a language based on keys that are incomprehensible to others, among other alterations that reflect the disorganization of thought. We use the term "cryptolalia" to refer to this "hidden speech" , often associated with cryptography.

What is cryptolalia?

Cryptolalia is defined as the use of a private and incomprehensible language for the rest of the people in order to prevent them from understanding it. The term is used in a specific way in the field of psychology, although its meaning is broader and we can also apply it in contexts where no type of mental alteration is present.

From a psychopathological point of view, the phenomenon of cryptolalia is generally associated with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia , which are characterised by a loss of contact with reality; this is manifested in symptoms and signs such as hallucinations, delusions, emotional flattening or disorganisation of thought and language.

However, cryptolalia need not be a consequence of psychological disorders. Technically, the definition of the concept can include any type of alteration of the oral language from a certain key , so that it cannot be understood by those who do not know it. Therefore, in some contexts it may have obvious practical uses.

Many children apply alterations to their speech based on very simple clues (such as adding an extra syllable on a regular basis) with the intention of secretly communicating with selected groups of peers. On the other hand, activities such as spying may find strategic uses for cryptolalia; cryptography should be mentioned here.

Relationship to cryptography

The term "cryptography" can be translated as "hidden writing"; therefore, it is easy to deduce its relationship with cryptolalia, which means "hidden speech". Thus, we can define cryptography as the use of coding techniques in written language so that only people who know the interpretation keys can read the final material.

As with cryptolalia, cryptography may or may not take place in the context of a psychological disorder. When this is the case, it often appears in conjunction with cryptolalia as part of a private language. As we have mentioned previously, psychoses are usually the most determining pathologies in its emergence.

The use of cryptography in different contexts is better known than that of cryptolalia, particularly in wartime conflicts. A particularly well-known example is the Enigma machine, which was used by the German military forces to both encode and decode messages during the Second World War.

Cryptolalia as a sign of schizophrenia

Scharfetter (1977) uses the concept of cryptolalia to refer to extreme manifestations of the language disorders that characterize psychoses , and in particular schizophrenia, whose main diagnostic criterion is the chronicity of the psychotic symptoms.

According to this author, some people with schizophrenia seek to achieve a private symbolism that only they can understand. This would lead them to create idiosyncratic words without a meaning agreed upon with the rest of society; if the level of complexity of the process is high, cryptology and cryptography are likely to occur.

However, the conceptualization on which Scharfetter works is difficult to distinguish from the phenomenon of neologism, another of the typical linguistic signs of schizophrenia. In the following section we will refer to this and other similar alterations, which constitute clear reflections of the disorganization of thought that occurs in this disorder.

Language disorders in psychosis

In addition to neologisms, which in psychopathology are defined as strange words whose meaning is only known by the person who uses them, many other language disorders appear in psychotic disorders. It is worth noting the similarity of some of these phenomena with those that characterize Wernicke’s aphasia, caused by brain injuries.

These language disorders may consist of a and mpoverty of speech or the appearance of productive disorders . In relation to the first group of phenomena, we can say that schizophrenia and the rest of psychoses usually involve the poverty of the content and form of spoken language, as a consequence of cognitive dysfunctions.

Also typical are general incoherence, forgetting the subject or the aim of the speech (derailment), frequent interruptions, tangentiality of answers to specific questions, increased speed of speech (logorrhoea) or selecting words according to their similarity to others and not on the basis of a particular subject.

Other linguistic phenomena that occur in these disorders are perseverance around the same theme, echolalia, which consists of involuntarily repeating other people’s words , assonance and alliteration (choosing words according to their sounds) and the use of an excessively elaborate and consequently pedantic and unnatural language.

Bibliographic references:

  • Scharfetter, C. (1977). Introduction to general psychopathology. Madrid: Ediciones morata.