Cryptophasia is the phenomenon of a language developed by twins (identical or fraternal) that only the two children can understand. The word has its roots from the Greek crypto-, meaning secret, and -phasia, meaning speech. Most linguists associate cryptophasia with idioglossia, which is any language used by only one, or very few, people. Cryptophasia differs from idioglossia on including mirrored actions like twin-walk and identical mannerisms.
Cryptophasia is the phenomenon of a language developed by twins (identical or fraternal) that only the two children can understand. The word has its roots from the Greek crypto-, meaning secret, and -phasia, meaning speech. Most linguists associate cryptophasia with idioglossia, which is any language used by only one, or very few, people. Cryptophasia differs from idioglossia on including mirrored actions like twin-walk and identical mannerisms.
== Classification == It has been reported that up to 50% of young twins will have their own twin language which they use to communicate only with each other and which cannot be understood by others. "In all cases known, the language consists of onomatopoeic expressions, some neologisms, but for the greatest part of words from the adult language adapted to the constrained phonological possibilities of young children. These words being hardly recognizable, the language may turn out to be completely unintelligible to speakers of the parents' languages, but they resemble each other in that they lack inflectional morphology and that word order is based on pragmatic principles such as saliency and the semantic scope of words. Neither the structure of the languages nor its emergence can be explained by other than situational factors."
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).