The Strange Story Of June And Jennifer Gibbons, The ‘Silent Twins’ Who Only Spoke To Each Other

"Silent twins" June and Jennifer Gibbons spoke only to each other, used their own special language, and mirrored each other's behavior for three decades straight.

“Silent twins” June and Jennifer Gibbons developed their own language because their speech impediment prevented others from understanding them.

In April 1963, a pair of twin girls were born at the military hospital in Aden, Yemen. Their births were not unusual, nor were their dispositions as infants, but soon enough, their parents began to see that June and Jennifer Gibbons were not like other kids.

Raised in Wales by their Barbadian immigrant parents, June Gibbons and Jennifer Gibbons soon retreated into their own private world. Due to a speech impediment, it was hard for others, even their parents, to understand them, and eventually, they developed a special language that was just theirs. They so seldom spoke to anyone else that they became known as the “silent twins” — and it wouldn’t be until one of the twins met her untimely death in 1993 that any sense of normalcy would be reclaimed.

This is the story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, the silent twins.

The Unusual Childhood Of June And Jennifer Gibbons

Not long after their girls hit speaking age, Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons realized that their twin daughters were different. Not only were they far behind their peers in regard to language skills, but they were also unusually inseparable, and the two girls seemed to have a private language that only they could understand.

“In the home, they’d talk, make sounds, and all that, but we knew that they weren’t quite like, you know, normal children, talking readily,” their father Aubrey recalled.

The Gibbons family was originally from Barbados and had immigrated to Great Britain in the early 1960s. Though the family spoke English at home, young June and Jennifer Gibbons began to speak another language, believed to be a sped-up version of Bajan Creole. The two would come to be known as the “silent twins” for their unwillingness to communicate with anyone except for each other.

Silent Twins June And Jennifer Gibbons

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The “silent twins” June and Jennifer Gibbons in elementary school.

It wasn’t only a singular dialect that kept the girls isolated. Being the only Black children in their elementary school made them the target of bullying, which only deepened their dependency on each other. As the bullying got worse, school officials began releasing the girls early, in the hopes that they could sneak out and avoid being harassed.

By the time June and Jennifer Gibbons were teenagers, their language had become unintelligible to anyone else. They had also developed other peculiarities, such as refusing to communicate with virtually any outsiders, refusing to read or write in school, and mirroring each other’s actions.

Years later, June summarized the dynamic with her sister as such: “One day, she’d wake up and be me, and one day I would wake up and be her. And we used to say to each other, ‘Give me back myself. If you give me back myself I’ll give you back yourself.'”

Others Begin To Notice The Strange Behavior Of “The Silent Twins”

In 1974, a medic named John Rees noticed the girls’ strange behavior while administering a yearly school-sanctioned health check. According to Rees, the twins were unusually non-reactive to being vaccinated. He described June and Jennifer Gibbons’ behavior as “doll-like” and quickly alerted the school’s headmaster.

When the headmaster brushed him off, noting that the girls were not “especially troubled,” Rees notified a child psychologist, who immediately insisted that the girls be enrolled in therapy. However, despite seeing several psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, the “silent twins” remained a mystery, and continued to refuse to speak to anyone else.

In February of 1977, a speech therapist, Ann Treharne, met with the two girls. While refusing to speak in Treharne’s presence, the two consented to having their dialogues recorded if left alone.

Treharne had the sense that June wished to speak to her but was being compelled not to do so by Jennifer. Treharne later said that Jennifer “sat there with an expressionless gaze, but I felt her power. The thought entered my mind that June was possessed by her twin.”