Twin Banter

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Alexa: You're twins.
Ian: What? No! Really?
Jeremy: Mum should have told us. I feel cheated!
Ian: Duped!
Jeremy: Hoodwinked!
Alexa: They think they're charming.
Liana: Rakish.
Alexa: Roguish.

A Twin Trope. The tendency of twins to banter with each other. This includes Finishing Each Other's Sentences and feeding each other lines, among other things. A common trait of Single-Minded Twins and Telepathic Twins.

This can also be done by other multiple siblings, or even Those Two Guys as long as they know each other well enough.

Truth in Television, especially with twins of the same gender, as sharing one room and being in the same grade means they spend much more time together than average siblings. For that matter, some sets of twins develop a language specific to themselves that no one else understands.

Examples of Twin Banter include:

Anime and Manga

Fan Works

Film

  • In the 1994 film Nell, Jodie Foster plays the surviving member of a pair of twins, whose almost-incomprehensible speech is a mix of heavily-accented (and mispronounced) Biblical vocabulary and a private twin language she created with her sister before she died.

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Gem and Gemma from Power Rangers RPM are an extreme case, as it is exceedingly rare for them to individually speak in complete sentences -- usually they alternate words or phrases.
  • The Sklar brothers of Cheap Seats. (It's also a staple of their stand-up routine.)

Music

  • The song "Idioglossary" by Ponyphonic is about a private language created by a pair of siblings and briefly covers some of how it was created. The title of the song is a shout-out to one of the formal terms for such a private language, "idioglossia", as noted below in Real Life.

Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

Visual Novels

Web Comics

Web Original

  • The Duumvirate does this without sentence-finishing.

Western Animation

Real Life

  • Musicians Tegan and Sara are known to do this.
  • The creation of a private language between twins is actually common enough to have a couple formal terms for it in psychological literature: "idioglossia" and "cryptophasia".