Pretense is often taken to be a complex cognitive activity that requires the capacity for symbolic thought, which is usually taken to imply mastery or skillful manipulation of linguistic concepts or semantic representations. Enactive accounts of pretense provide alternative proposals, where pretending is seen as an embodied activity that takes place in the skillful interactions of the agents with their environments. Pretending does not take place “inside the head”, and can occur before achieving linguistic mastery. Enactivists also provide an account of pretend play without referring to mental representations or internal symbol-swapping architectures. Instead, they appeal to affordances, social practices and capacities for sense-making. This leaves open the following question: what role is left for language to play in their accounts of pretense? To answer this question, we start by conceptualizing pretense through a new framework of praxeological enactivism, which showcases pretend play in terms of activities of alternative sense-making that do not need to be shaped by complex linguistic capacities. We then explain how to conceive of language and verbalizations from a praxeological enactivist point of view, discussing both the roles of nonverbal languaging practices for pretense, and linguistic verbalizations. Against this background, we show that verbalizations enrich and transform pretend play in seven specific ways.