Peppa Pig has American children who speak English again, doesn’t she?

Sound the alarm: British mole agent, Peppa Pig, once again corrupts our American youth, damn. Although she looks like a harmless cartoon character designed to entertain children, she was discovered as an agent of British cultural hegemony actively working to undermine the sovereignty of nations around the world. As the the Wall Street newspaper reports, thanks to a year and a half of living at home induced by the pandemic, parents are noticing their children saying nonsense about “trucks”, “gas stations” and “cookies” to their “mummies and dads” . The guilty? Hours of Peppa Pig binge-watching.

A 6-year-old Rhode Island girl passed by last December “[insisting] on British holiday traditions of wearing a wreath and baking chopped pies for ‘Santa Claus’.

“Mom, are you going to the optician?” a California kindergarten named Dani apparently asked their mom (say it right!) the other day. “We said to ourselves: ‘the what? “It’s like a college-level word … At least I wasn’t using it,” Dani’s self-deprecating father, Matias Cavallin, told the WSJ. As parents like Cavallin balanced work and child rearing, they increasingly relied on children’s programs to entertain and educate them in their Zoom meetings and work-from-home scenarios. Soon, “Tthe Peppa effect,“as some call it, has become a nationwide epidemic.

… And yet, evidence of “some kids sniffing like pigs and using cheeky Britishisms” was documented long before the onset of COVID-19. After states put locks in place, however, the kids “gorged themselves on the cartoon in a silo away from their usual social interactions, amplifying the effect.” Now kids across the country are insisting on asking to turn on the “TV” for more Anglophile indoctrination lessons from Her Majesty Peppa. The company behind Peppa Pig, for its part, thinks the kids are just imitating the character because they “see her as a friend.”

According to researchers from Parrot Analytics, Ltd., a consulting company that tracks entertainment analytics through social media chats and streaming statistics, Peppa Pig rose from 103rd to 50th most requested show across all genres in the past year. More terrifyingly, this is the second most requested children’s show in the world in the past 12 months, with only Sponge Bob SquarePants up front, but you don’t hear a bunch of 6 year olds running around sounding like SpongeBob, Squidward or Sandy, initiate?

Oh no….

[via BoingBoing]

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