Poto and Cabengo
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Poto and Cabengo were a pair of identical twin girls (real names Grace and Virginia Kennedy, respectively), who used a secret language up to the age of about 8. Poto and Cabengo is also the name of a documentary film about the girls made by Jean-Pierre Gorin and released in 1979.
They were apparently of normal intelligence; they developed their own communication because they had little exposure to spoken language in their early years. The girls were also expected to be retarded as they were epileptic.
Their language was spoken extremely quickly and had a staccato rhythm. These characteristics transferred themselves to the girls' English, which they began to speak following speech therapy. Linguistic analysis of their language revealed that it was a mixture of English and German, with some neologisms and several idiosyncratic grammatical features.
The film was mis-cited as "Poto and Cabenga" in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, and quite a few other citations seem to be drawn entirely from that reference.
Sample speech extract
- GRACE: Cabengo, padem manibadu peeta.
- VIRGINIA: Doan nee bada tengkmatt, Poto.
External links
- IMDb entry (http://imdb.com/title/tt0196866/)