It should be no surprise to find that Klingon children speak differently from Klingon adults. The phenomenon is found in most societies throughout the galaxy. As children learn their language, they give distinct pronunciations to certain sounds, lack a full grasp of the grammar, and use some words in ways adults find inappropriate. Because the same patterns are followed by a great many Klingon children, however, it is possible to describe certain characteristics of children's speech.

By the time Klingon children are old enough to know many words and speak in short but well-formed sentences, most of the sounds associated with "baby talk" are gone. Nevertheless, it takes several more years for all of the sounds to disappear from their verbalizations, giving the speech of young children a distinctive sound. As a rule, before a child's First Rite of Ascension, all remaining traces of childhood speech have disappeared.

Among the most noticeable features setting children's speech apart from that of adults are the sounds of three consonants. First, the sound j is often pronounced not as "j" in Federation Standard "jar," but instead more like the "s" in Federation Standard "pleasure" or "si" in "vision". If this sound is transcribed as zh, the verb naj ("dream") would be nazh; jav ("six") sounds more like zhav. Second, the sound ng, which, for adults, is like the last sound in Federation Standard is pronounced as n at the ends of syllables, and more like the "ni" in Federation Standard "onion" (as if "ny") at the beginning. Thus, the children's pronunciation of mang ("soldier") would be man; the pronunciation of ngeD ("be easy") would be nyeD. Finally, the consonant q, in the speech of children, sounds much more like Federation Standard "k" than an adult q does. For example, quS ("chair") is more like kuS, and tuq ("house [lineage]") is more like tuk.

Curiously, a fourth consonantal alteration, though relatively uncommon, is the one most associated with children's speech. A minority of children pronounce tlh as ch, particularly at the end of syllables. For example, qatlh ("why") is pronounced qach, and botlh ("middle") is boch. Though the resulting forms may be real, though different, words (qach, for example, is "structure, building," and boch means "be shiny"), there is seldom any confusion because the identically pronounced words are used in such different contexts. If a child were to say qach jej taj, that could mean only "Why is the knife sharp?" (qach, mispronunciation of qatlh, "why"; jej, "be sharp"; taj, "knife"). If qach were "structure," the Klingon sentence would be as ungrammatical and nonsensical as "The knife sharps the structure." On the other hand, children occasionally do make unintentionally ambiguous statements. If a child who pronounces tlh as ch were to say, for instance, mach SuvwI'pu', it is not clear whether he or she means "Warriors are loyal" (mach, mispronunciation of matlh, "be loyal"; SuvwI'pu', "warriors") or "Warriors are small" (mach "be small").