From the BBC comes a delightfully educational story about a pair of identical twins who developed their own language.
‘Umeri’ is not anything you’ll find on Google Translate: it has only two speakers, Matthew and Michael Youlden.
It’s written here as being “developed” rather than invented because Umeri is a sophisticated and extremely rare example of a phenomenon known as “twin speak.”
Twin speak is a mutually intelligible communication pattern developed by twins that is typically unintelligible by anyone else. It arises naturally in twins—or even very closely aged non-twin siblings, around the time that the child is developing their earliest concepts in language.
The technical term is “cryptophasia” or ‘secret talk’ but this Greek designation is a rather cold and heartless way of viewing the fascinating phenomenon. Experts in the little-researched field of understanding twin speak say it has nothing to do with keeping dialogue secret from parents, but rather emerges as both children babble their way to correct speech.
“In most cases it seemed to be a developmental phenomenon occurring in the second year of life with the emergence of immature speech, and decreasing considerably over the next 16 months,” reads a cohort study published in 2010 examining twin speak. “A small group of children, primarily male twins, was reported to use a private language at 36 months.”
However, the Youlden Twins insist Umeri isn’t about keeping anything private.
“Umeri isn’t ever reduced to a language used to keep things private,” the twins told the BBC in an email. “It definitely has a very sentimental value to us, as it reflects the deep bond we share as identical twins.”
Their story of developing their twin speak into a flushed-out language comes from their fascination with languages in general. With the social media handle Superpolyglotbros, they work as language consultants, and speak a whopping 25 languages each.
It started during a trip to Spain when the twins were 8 years old. Worried they’d be unable to order ice cream, they set about learning Spanish armed only with a phrase book. Worrying not a wink for the grammar, they directly translated English phrases into Spanish, before slowly doing the same for Italian and Portuguese, building up a love of languages to last a lifetime.
As the 2010 study notes, flourishing twin speak can often be attributed to less stimulative, less responsible household environments. This can sometimes happen when twins learn to communicate with each other, and parents don’t speak to each twin individually.
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The study found that the twins who had the poorest language skills between the ages of 4 to 6 were those twins who had the most robust twin speech. However, continued research on the topic eventually found that use of a private language was not a statistically significant factor in the delay of speech in twins.
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To wit, the Youldens were never discouraged from using their twin speak, they were just “off doing their language thing.”
The Youldens are constantly developing Umeri, and always have been, by adopting grammatical structures that stimulated their curiosity from other languages into it.
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They routinely have to decide words for modern terminology, particularly as it relates to technology. However, neither has any intention of sharing Umeri with, for example, their own children.
It’s an intimate language spoken by two people, and as such, they admitted, it has an expiry date.
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