About

Talking Twin Babies (also known as "twin babies conversations") are video remixes using footage of twin toddler boys accompanied by custom subtitles to appear as if the babies are discussing a topical issue, similar to the Hitler Reacts subtitled videos.

Origin

On February 14th, 2011, YouTuber jayrandall22011 uploaded a video of his twin sons titled "Talking Twin Babies." The video featured two toddler boys babbling incoherently at one another in what appeared to be some sort of primitive baby language.

The original YouTube upload accumulated over 54 million views within 10 months.

Spread

The video hit the front page of Reddit^[2] on March 28th, 2011 and received 3,232 up votes prior to being archived. The following day it was posted on BuzzFeed^[3] and was subsequently updated with a link^[7] to a subtitled version about an escaped Bronx Zoo cobra. On March 31st, 2011, several subtitled versions were posted to the Internet culture blog Urlesque^[6] and in an article in The Washington Post.^[4] On April 3rd, The Daily Mail^[5] published on article revealing that the brothers were Sam and Ren McEntee and were 17-months-old at the time the video was recorded. The mother of the twins maintains the blog Twin Mama Rama^[4] that chronicles the lives of her two sons.

Cryptophasia

It has been suggested that the twins were developing an idioglossia called cyptophasia, an autonomous language that twins often develop at young ages that only they can understand. From Wikipedia:^[1]

Cryptophasia is a peculiar phenomenon of a language developed by twins (identical or fraternal) that only the two children could understand. The word has its roots from crypto meaning secret and phasia meaning speech disorder. Most linguists associate cryptophasia with idioglossia, which is literally the same, but cryptophasia also includes mirrored actions like twin-walk and identical mannerisms.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search queries for "talking twins", "talking twin babies" and "twin babies conversation" spiked in April of 2011, 1 month after the original video had been posted to Reddit.

External References