Grammelot is a term for a style of language in satirical theatre, a gibberish with macaronic and onomatopoeic elements, used in association with mime and mimicry. Gibberish is a generic term in English for talking that sounds like speech but has no actual meaning. ... Macaronic refers to text spoken or written using a mixture of languages. ... The sound of hitting a ball can be described as Whack. In rhetoric, linguistics and poetry, onomatopoeia is a figure of speech that employs a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates, echoes, or suggests the object it is describing, such as bang, click, fizz, hush or buzz... Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet Standard for the format of e-mail. ... A mimic is any species that has evolved to appear similar to another successful species in order to dupe predators into avoiding the mimic, or dupe prey into approaching the mimic. ...

The format dates back to the 16th century Commedia dell'arte, and some claim Grammelot to be a specific universal language (akin to Lingua franca) devised to give performers safety from censorship and appeal whatever the dialect of the audience. (15th century - 16th century - 17th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 16th century was that century which lasted from 1501 to 1600. ... Karel Dujardins set his closely-observed scene of a travelling troupes makeshift stage against idealized ruins in the Roman Campagna: dated 1657 (Louvre Museum) Commedia dellarte, (Italian, meaning comedy of professional artists) was a form of improvisational theater which began in the 16th century and was popular until... Lingua franca, literally Frankish language in Italian, was originally a mixed language consisting largely of Italian plus a vocabulary drawn from Turkish, Persian, French, Greek and Arabic and used for communication throughout the Middle East. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ...

However, the term appears to be a modern invention by Nobel-winning Italian playwright Dario Fo. His satirical touring show Mistero Buffo ("Comic Mystery Play") involved sketches based on mediaeval sources, told in Fo's own grammelots constructed from archaic Po Valley dialects and phonemes from modern languages (he has coined separate Italian, French and American grammelots). In his Nobel speech, Fo said that his inspiration was the 16th century Italian playwright Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco), who invented a similar language based on Italian dialects, Latin, Spanish, German and onomatopoeic sounds. Photographs of Nobel Prize Medals. ... This article needs to be wikified. ... Po redirects here, for alternate uses see Po (disambiguation). ... In spoken language, a phoneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words (that is, changing a phoneme in a word, produces another word, that has a different meaning). ...

Franco Rame is also said to have used the term Grammelot in describing his literary inventions.

Another notable modern Italian exponent is the Milan actor/writer Gianni Ferrario. Mainstream comics have also used Grammelot-like language: for instance, Stanley Unwin. Location within Italy Piazza della Scala Milan (Italian: Milano; Milanese dialect: Milán) is the main city in northern Italy, and is located in the plains of Lombardy, the most populated and developed of Italian regions. ... Cover from Rock-a-bye Babel by Stanley Unwin and Roy Dewar. ...

Examples of an English-based Grammelot by Massachusetts performer Alex O'Brien Feldman (Alexander, King of Jesters) include:

co yo yo - curly or twisted (or slang for 'wow' since jesters prefer things that are twisted and bent).

hodio tonada - an exclamation of surprise like “woah, check it out!”

Waga dee bwa - I am

Waga da bala - He is

Kafuggo! - darn it!

bo-whoo - (low voice) the big one

wuh hoo - the medium one

eee oo - (pronounced in a high voice) the little one

bweesta - fish

galeggwi - up

jiffa - middle

peet - down

Basnop ka dipple yadda yadda - rather than try to fix the problem, just validate my feelings

Kafuggo! Snippa blop! - But I'm just trying to help!

(Background information from Language Log.)