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A fact from June and Jennifer Gibbons appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 28 April 2004. The text of the entry was as follows:
June Gibbons has been pretty vocal about the fact that she and Jennifer were not 'speaking their own language', but were speaking Bajan and later English with a severe speech impediment, as well as a strong Creole accent, and that this was so difficult for others to understand that people believed they had made up an entirely new language, which has become a large part of the mythology surrounding the twins even to this day. I think it's a little troublesome for the article to objectively claim that they were speaking in an invented language, when it was in fact a mixture of a speech impediment and regional dialect. Would welcome thoughts on how to better present this in the article. Whynotlolol (talk) 18:05, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In this BBC Wales interview she talks about it fairly extensively. She summarises it as follows, quoted in this article: 'We had a speech impediment. Our parents couldn't understand a word that we were saying, nobody understood - so we stopped talking.' Speaking more specifically about the fact that they were speaking English, she says: 'I don't think the teachers in Yorkshire knew what we were saying at all.' She also says: 'we had to point at things we wanted, when our mother asked us what we wanted for tea or whatever. She thought we were talking a different language.' Her mother says: 'it troubled them, when they knew we couldn't understand [them], they went back in their shell.' In this interview, June also mentions that they went to speech therapy. June says: 'they would say, can you say that again in English? Can you say that again, please? People think that me and my sister planned to stop talking. It's a fairytale to say that we made a pact that we would stop talking.' In an older BBC documentary from 1993 (available on YouTube) she says: 'it was frustrating [that people couldn't understand us]. We had to repeat ourselves more often. And then we couldn't be bothered to repeat ourselves, so we didn't speak. We left it. They'd end up saying, what are you saying? What are you saying? And we'd just say, you can't hear us now, you can't hear us [n]ever. So we decided not to speak, and it got into a habit of not speaking.' Whynotlolol (talk) 18:42, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think we can assume that the YouTube upload by "GottaFindPants is a copyvio, so we can't use it directly, but the other sources look fine to me. You could add some quotes. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:04, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ha, yes, probably best to avoid GottaFindPants! I've added some quotes to the main article and included timestamped sources from the BBC podcast interviews. Whynotlolol (talk) 23:05, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
