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Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua
A fascinating article ( genre: how-come-I-did-not-know-this ?) appeared recently in Science magazine, detailing the development of the Nicaraguan Sign Language or ISN (Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua). The ISN is a signing language developed independently from other sign languages in the late seventies when the Sandinista government set up the first schools for deaf children in the capital city of Managua. check the official story from wordiq: It also represents the formation of a new language without an adult community of fluent native “speakers”, which is otherwise quite unusual. Normal creoles develop from the pidgin mixture of two (or more) distinct communities of fluent speakers, but this pidgin (and later creole) developed from a group of young people with no first language. History Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the newly installed Nicaraguan Government had hundreds of deaf students enrolled in two Managua schools. Initially, the education officials adopted “finger spelling”, using simple signs to limn the alphabets of spoken languages. The result was a complete failure, because most students did not even grasp the concept of words, never having been exposed either to spoken or to written language. The children remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers. Initially, the students could only use crude gestural signs developed within their own families, but once the students were placed together, they began to build on one another's signs. While the inexperienced teachers found it hard to understand their students, the children had no problem communicating with each other. A new language had begun to bloom. Within just a few generations, a mature language with rules and grammar was born. The Sandinista officials asked for help from outside scholars. After the linguists finally decoded the children's creation, Nicaraguan Sign Language became a classical case of modern linguistics. Some linguists see what happened in Managua as proof that language acquisition is hard-wired inside the human brain. “The Nicaraguan case is absolutely unique in history”, Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, maintains. “We've been able to see how it is that children not adults generate language, and we have been able to record it happening in great scientific detail. And it's the first and only time that we've actually seen a language being created out of thin air.” What I find intriguing here is the fact that version of the language used by the first generation children, now in their 30s, is much cruder and much more gestural (kinda like what a hearing adult would do if she tried to sign), while the versions spoken by subsequent generations exhibit myriad linguistic building blocks that are a lot less gestural and can be combined in numerous ways to form a variety of meanings and nuance. Now these developments over such a short period and the fact that the language these kids spoke finally was much more complex than what they were exposed to initially, makes a good case for the creative contribution of these children. The necessity to reach out and touch in the most basic way, in spite of an otherwise crippling disability seems to have been the mother of this kind of [hardwired] linguistic inventiveness. Thursday, Sep 23 2004 - 14:39
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