The Unspeakable Wonder
In the age of globalization, where different cultures and human diversity continue to become homogenous, there are still roughly 6,500 different languages spoken around the world. A lot of them are endangered, nearly extinct, or grasping on the last straw.
When a language goes extinct, more often than not an entire culture goes extinct with it. Such is the significance of languages. It forms the identity, the beliefs, the customs, the heritage of a person and the community associate with it. It preserves values and traditions continued over thousands of years.
While it is common to hear of languages going extinct, it is relatively rare to hear of a new one being added to the list of human languages and even rare to have a sign language added to the list; a sign language invented spontaneously by mere children.
It was the year 1979. The Somoza regime had been overthrown by the Sandinistas, who had big plans, which included a massive literacy campaign that was launched in 1980. This campaign also had a provision for the education of deaf children (aged 4–16), which were previously isolated from each other and used simple home sign systems. A vocational school for deaf adolescents was opened in the area of Managua of Villa Libertad.
In 3 years, nearly 400 deaf students had enrolled in the school. Usually, the deaf population across the Americas is taught the American Sign Language, which is the lingua franca for deaf people throughout the two continents. But the school preferred to teach the students lip-reading and Spanish, in which they achieved little success. With students failing to grasp the concept of Spanish words, they remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers. The program was on the verge of being a failure.
Unbeknownst to the faculty though, the schoolyard, the street, and the school bus provided fertile ground for the deaf students to communicate with one another. By combining gestures and home signs, a primitive form of the Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged. This form is now called Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense (LSN) and is still used by some students who attended the school.
When the staff of the school noticed this new development, they asked sign language linguists for help. In 1986, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education contacted Judy Kegl, an American Sign Language linguist from MIT. Kegl and other researchers concluded that the primitive form of the language had evolved to a higher level of complexity — which had its own conventions of grammar and verb agreement. This developed form of the sign language was named Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN).
ISN now offers a rare opportunity to study the emergence of a new language and provides an insight into how languages are formed. It has been recognized by the Nicaraguan government and is one of the few languages whose birth has been recorded.
Steven Pinker, the author of The Language Instinct notes-
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 only time that we’ve actually seen a language being created out of thin air.
The Nicaraguan Sign Language will remain a wonder for linguists around the world. Given the speed at which the language spontaneously formed and evolved, it would be appropriate to note that actions do speak louder than (spoken) words.
