Identical twins Matthew and Michael Youlden can speak 26 languages - one of which cannot be found in the annals of etymology.
Inspired by the multicultural landscape of their hometown of Manchester in the UK, the polyglots who now run their own language learning company became interested in foreign language studies from an early age.
Their first language, however, was all their own: Umer.
“Umar has never been reduced to a language used to keep things private,” the identical twin brothers told the BBC in a joint message. “It definitely has a lot of sentimental value to us, as it reflects the deep bond we share as identical twins.”
Youngsters can’t remember a time before Umeri, recalling as preschoolers their bewildered guardians while the boys joked in pairs.
Spanish was their third language, learned on a family holiday when they were eight, followed by Italian and Scandinavian languages - all the while studying and developing a grammatical structure for their adult language.
About 30-50% of twins create a unique form of communication, a phenomenon known as cryptophasia, according to the BBC.
While it deepens the relationship between the twins, such exclusivity can be alienating.
“Twins have this common language that at some point they stop using, like they’re ashamed of it,” Matthew told the BBC. When he and Michael would gather in Umer, their friends and family shrugged: “They’re doing the language thing again.”
Nancy Segal, director of the Center for Twin Studies at California State University, warned parents of twins who exhibit private speech patterns that these habits can have a negative social impact. “One problem with twins is that parents tend to leave them alone because they entertain each other, but then they don’t have language models to raise,” she said.
Such was the case of Barbadian twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, who grew up in Wales in the 1970s. The sisters were bullied from an early age for a shared speech impediment and became so antisocial that they vowed to they only talked to each other.
At 19, their speech was unintelligible. The troubled sisters began a life of crime before being caught and committed to a high-security psychiatric facility in Broadmoor, England.
“We were desperate, we were trapped in our twinning and trapped in that language, we tried everything to separate ourselves,” June said in a BBC podcast in 2023 about their lives.
There are few reliable case studies of twin speech as most twins forget their separate languages, according to Karen Thorpe, who studies language development in twins at the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute. However, many will carry special nicknames and non-verbal cues that only twins can interpret. “They may not have what we would call an exclusive language, but they do have something that is quite special,” she said.
Segal agrees. In general, she told the BBC, “twins don’t invent new language, they tend to produce atypical forms of the language they are exposed to. Even though it’s incomprehensible, they still direct it at other people.”
While Michael and Matthew have no intention of passing on their language, they have continued to develop and fine-tune Umeri for themselves.
“It’s one of those things that unfortunately has an expiration date on it.”
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