Idioglossia: Idioglossia refers to an idiosyncratic language, one invented and spoken by only one or a very few people. Most often, idioglossia refers to the "private languages" of young children, especially twins. It is also known as cryptophasia, and commonly referred to as twin talk or twin speech.
R and G's 'normal' speech has come on leaps and bounds in the last few months and we have got to the point where we can have short conversations with them. However, there are times when they babble at each other in a language that we can't understand.
If we had one child and they were only hearing our (mostly adult) conversations, their speech would be more advanced. As they spend all their time together and are at the same stage in their development, they tend to learn from, and copy each other. Therefore, if one of them decides to adopt a particular way of saying a word e.g. 'Dee-da' instead of 'water', the other one will copy it and they start to believe that they are saying it correctly. Undoing this is actually more difficult than one might think. 'Water' is an everyday, many times a day word and we say it to them repeatedly. Yet they insist on referring it to as 'dee-da'.
The situation is probably compounded by the fact that they attend nursery three days a week, where they are surrounded by young children at a range of speech levels, from babies cooing and babbling to pre-schoolers having full-blown conversations. The cacophony of noise must be terribly confusing.
We've always made a point of taking to the girls in 'adult' voices. I'm not one for baby talk. Dh is much quieter than I am and speaks quite softly. I'm generally much louder and have a harsher tone to my voice. My point is, we speak to the girls pretty much constantly - sometimes I feel like I'm providing the girls with a running commentary on their lives - so I don't think there's much more we can do to promote their speech.
G is much better with her speech than R and picks up new words and phrases very quickly. R seems to internalise a lot of information, but will suddenly come out with a new, perfectly formed sentence when the mood takes her.
The key thing seems to be that idioglossia is a phase (isn't everything a phase with children?!) and they will grow out of it.
