Aisha Tukur
Up to 50% of twins develop their own communication pattern with one another. Most lose it over time, but for the Youlden twins it has become a normal way of communicating.
Twins Matthew and Michael Youlden speak 25 languages each. The 26th is Umeri, which they don’t include in their tally.
If you’ve not heard of Umeri, there’s good reason for that. Michael and Matthew are the only two people who speak, read and write it, having created it themselves as children.
The brothers insist Umeri isn’t an intentionally secret language.
“Umeri isn’t ever reduced to a language used to keep things private,” they say in an email. “It definitely has a very sentimental value to us, as it reflects the deep bond we share as identical twins.”
An estimated 30-50% of twins develop a shared language or particular communication pattern that is only comprehensible to them, known as cryptophasia. The term translates directly from Greek as secret speech.
Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, believes there are now better and more nuanced words for the phenomenon, and prefers to use “private speech”. In her book Twin Mythconceptions, Segal also uses the phrase “shared verbal understanding” to refer to speech used within the pair.
“Based on available studies, it is safe to say that about 40% of twin toddlers engage in some form of ‘twin-speak’,” writes Segal. “But that figure does not convey just how complex twins’ language development turns out to be.”
Umeri is now written using the Latin alphabet, though the Youlden twins tried to design their own alphabet for the language
Roy Johannink from the Netherlands is father to teenage twins Merle and Stijn. Thirteen years ago, when they were babies, he took a video of them babbling to one another and shared it on YouTube. To date, their conversation has had over 30 million views. Johannink happened to have his camera on hand at the moment the two first began to verbally interact with each other.
“I was a little surprised that they saw each other,” remembers Johannink. “They thought: ‘Hey, I’m not alone in this moment. There’s another one of me! It’s us against the world.'”
Segal explains that like Merle and Stijn (who went on to lose their shared language when they learnt Dutch), most twins outgrow their private words as they gain more exposure to other people beyond the home.
But for the Youlden twins, this wasn’t the case. They didn’t outgrow their language. Quite the contrary, they enriched and perfected it over the years.
Born and raised in Manchester in the UK, the Youlden twins grew up surrounded by different ethnicities and cultures, fostering a love of languages.
Memories of when Umeri first began are hazy, but the brothers remember their grandfather being confused when as pre-schoolers, the two would share a joke between themselves he would not understand.
Then came their first family holiday abroad, at the age of eight. They were headed to Spain and decided they were going to learn Spanish, convinced that if they didn’t, they’d struggle to order ice cream. Armed with a dictionary and with little understanding of how the grammar worked, they began to translate phrases word for word from English into Spanish. Later they took on Italian, and then turned their attention to learning Scandinavian languages. Pooling together various grammatical elements of all the languages they had studied, the brothers realised Umeri could actually become a fully-fledged language itself.
This chimes with Segal’s observations. According to her, in general, “twins do not invent a new language, they tend to produce atypical forms of the language they are exposed to. Even though it’s unintelligible, they still direct it to other people”.
The Youlden twins began to standardise and codify Umeri. At one point, they even tried to design their own alphabet but realised (when they got their first computer) it would be of little use considering there was no Umeri font. Umeri is now written using the Latin alphabet.
