Matthew and Michael Youlden are twins, and each speak twenty-five languages (yes, you have read correctly). Finally, twenty-six, if we include the Umeri in the count. If this language does not tell you anything, do not panic, it is completely normal. Michael and Matthew are the only ones to speak, read and write it because they are the creators.
In addition to the impressive number of languages they master, using a mode of communication understandable only by them is not unusual: an article in the BBC explains that between 30 and 50% of twins develop one. This phenomenon is better known as “cryptophasia” (or “secret language”), from the Greek “kryptos” which means “hidden”, and “phasis” which means “speech”.
Today, there would be more suitable terms to designate this privileged communication. For Nancy Segal, a psychologist specializing in the study of twins, the expressions “private language” and “shared verbal understanding” are more appropriate. Indeed, “”The figures do not show to what extent the development of a language between the twins is complex ”.
A language often abandoned over time
Thirteen years ago in the Netherlands, Roy Johannink became the father of twins, Merle and Stijn. While they were babies, Roy filmed them chirping. Today, their conversation has been viewed more than 30 million times on YouTube. Unfortunately, Merle and Stijn have lost their private language: “When they are exposed to other people outside the home, most twins gradually abandon their cryptophasia,” explains Nancy Segal. Also, like any minority language-that is to say a language spoken by minorities, like Breton-, cryptophasia can be abandoned because of an embarrassment developed in those who use it.
This is not the case with the Youlden twins who, on the contrary, have enriched and perfected their language over the years. The memories of their first Umeri exchanges are fuzzled, but they remember their disconcerted grandfather when, young children, they joked between them without anyone understanding them. Through travel, the brothers accumulated several grammatical elements of the languages encountered and studied, to form the Umeri, their language in its own right. A story that joins the observations of Nancy Shegal: “In general, twins do not invent a new language. Rather, they tend to produce forms of communication from the languages they were exposed. ”
The work of Karen Thorpe, specialist in the development of the child at the University of Queensland (Australia), show that twins are slightly more exposed to a risk of delay in language. However, this would not have a connection with the development of private language. His research rather indicates that the delay is partly linked to the fact that twins receive less individual attention from parents.
To remedy it, Karen Thorpe advises to “Make sure to speak to twins one by one, so that they are individually exposed to language. Parents easily tend to leave the twins between them because they have fun together. But, in fact, they have no models for a more worked language. ” For the Youlden twins, the creation of the Umeri was only a positive experience. And if they do not live in the same place today, they continue to develop their language by adding new words to designate things that recently appeared.
