Nuts and Bolts: Nicaraguan Sign Language.

How does a new language develop from scratch?

We know that new words are invented all the time, and we know that sometimes two or more languages will meet and merge to form first a pidgin, and then later a creole.

But how about a new language with no ancestors? None at all?

It may seem unlikely that the formation of such a language has ever been observed, but it has, and the most famous and studied of these events happened in west Nicaragua in the 1970s and 80s.

The new language came into being after schools for the deaf were set up for the first time in the area. To begin with the children were taught Spanish finger-spelling by their teachers, but few of the children ever understood this method of expressing meaning, and among themselves they began to use a mixture of the basic gestures and signs they had each individually used at home to communicate with their families. 

This led to a situation where it was now the teachers who couldn't understand what was being communicated; and so an expert, Judy Kegl from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was brought in to help. She discovered that the sign language the children were using had gone past the bolting-together-of-individual-signs stage, and had become a sophisticated language with its own grammar.  

This language is now known Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, or ISL

What has ISL taught us about the invention of an entirely new language?

Well, perhaps the most fascinating thing might be that it was when younger children joined the school and started using the sign language that it stopped being a basic bolting together of signs, and became infinitely more subtle. For instance, the space in which signs were made became variable and important, and this variation might express something like a pronoun, or might express an individual left/right concept missing from the signing of the older children.

And the conclusion to be drawn from this? 

Well, one conclusion this extraordinary story suggests is that in the beginning we didn't teach children to speak.

They taught us.

Word To Use Today: deaf. The Old English for this word was dēaf.