Nicaraguan Sign Language (or ISN, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua or Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense) is a signed language spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. It is of particular interest to linguists because it offers a unique opportunity to study the "birth" of a new language. Managua, with a population of about 1,723,100 in 2004, is the capital of Nicaragua. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Home sign (homesign or kitchen sign) is a term used to describe the gestural communication system developed by a deaf individual (together with those they grow up around) who hasnt learned either a spoken language or a signed language such as those used by deaf communities around the world. ... American Sign Language (ASL, also Amslan obs. ... Fingerspelling (somtimes known as dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... A sign language (also signed language) is a language which uses manual communication instead of sound to convey meaning - simultaneously combining handshapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speakers thoughts. ... Sign language is not universal. ... The legal recognition of sign languages is one of the major concerns of the international Deaf community. ... A sign language (also signed language) is a language which uses manual communication instead of sound to convey meaning - simultaneously combining handshapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speakers thoughts. ... The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ... MacGyver - 1980s hero The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive. ...

History

Before the 1970s, there was no deaf community in Nicaragua. Deaf people were largely isolated from each other, and used simple home sign systems and gesture ('mimicas') to communicate with their families and friends. The conditions necessary for a language to arise occurred in 1977, when a center for special education established a program initially attended by 50 young deaf children. The number of students at the school (in the Managua neighborhood of San Judas) grew to 100 by 1979, the year of the Sandinista revolution. The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ... This article needs to be wikified. ... Home sign (homesign or kitchen sign) is a term used to describe the gestural communication system developed by a deaf individual (together with those they grow up around) who hasnt learned either a spoken language or a signed language such as those used by deaf communities around the world. ... Military signalmen use hand and body gestures to direct flight operations aboard aircraft carriers. ... Managua, with a population of about 1,723,100 in 2004, is the capital of Nicaragua. ... This page refers to the year 1979. ... The Sandinista flag This article is about the Nicaraguan left-wing political party. ...

In 1980, a vocational school for adolescent deaf children was opened in the area of Managua called Villa Libertad. By 1983 there were over 400 deaf students enrolled in the two schools. Initially, the language program emphasised spoken Spanish and lipreading, and the use of signs by teachers limited to fingerspelling (using simple signs to sign the alphabet). The program achieved little success, with most students failing to grasp the concept of words. However, while the children remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers, the playground, hallways and the bus to-and-from school provided fertile ground for them to communicate with each other, and by combining gestures and elements of their home-sign systems, a pidgin-like form, and then a creole-like language rapidly emerged. They were creating their own language. This "first-stage" pidgin has been called Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense (LSN), and is still used by some of those who were already teenagers when they attended the school at this time. 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Lip reading is a technique of understanding spoken language without hearing its sounds. ... A manual alphabet is a system of representing all the letters of an alphabet, using only the hands. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... // A creole language, or just creole, is a well-defined and stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages, typically with many distinctive features that are not inherited from either parent. ...

Staff at the school, unaware of the development of this new language, saw the children's gesturing as mime, and as a failure to acquire Spanish. Unable to understand what the children were saying to each other, they asked for outside help, and in June 1986, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education contacted Judy Kegl, an American Sign Language linguist from Northeastern University. As Kegl and other researchers began to analyze the language, they noticed that the young children had taken the pidgin-like form of the older children to a higher level of complexity, with verb agreement and other conventions of grammar. This more complex sign language is now known as Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN). 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Several countries have government departments named the Ministry of Education Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Japan) Ministry of Education (India) Ministry of Education (New Zealand) Ministry of Education (Israel) Ministry of Education (Malaysia) Ministry of Education (Singapore) See also: Minister of Education, Department of Education This is... American Sign Language (ASL, also Amslan obs. ... This article is about the American institution. ...

The story of Nicaraguan Sign Language has been widely reported around the world.

ISN and linguistics

ISN 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 language developed from a group of young people with only non-conventional home sign systems and gesture. Home sign (homesign or kitchen sign) is a term used to describe the gestural communication system developed by a deaf individual (together with those they grow up around) who hasnt learned either a spoken language or a signed language such as those used by deaf communities around the world. ...

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." The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a postulated organ of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language (ie. ... Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is a prominent American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and popular science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging defence of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. ...

Since 1990, several other researchers have begun to study and report on the development of this unique language and its community (including Ann Senghas, Marie Coppola, Richard Senghas, Laura Polich, etc.). While each has their own unique interpretation of the events leading to this language and its development since, all agree that the phenomenon being studied is one of the richest sources of data on language emergence discovered to date.

Controversy

When is it language?

Researchers disagree regarding at what stage in the development of ISN it was to be considered a fully-fledged language. Coppola argues that isolated family signed systems in Nicaragua already contain components that can be called language. Kegl argues that following an intermediate stage where deaf contact gesturers came together and developed a contact communication sufficient to make young children think their input was a language to be acquired, the first generation of young children acquired a language as complete and rich as any human language known to date and that subsequent changes constitute an expected process of historical change. R. Senghas argues that once ISN came into being it became more and more complex over successive cohorts of young acquirers.

Linguistic imperialism

From the beginning of her research in Nicaragua in 1986 until Nicaraguan Sign Language was well-established, Kegl carefully avoided introducing the signed languages she was previously familar with, in particular American Sign Language, to the Deaf community in Nicaragua. A type of linguistic imperialism had been occurring internationally for decades where individuals would introduce ASL to populations of Deaf people in other countries, oftentimes supplanting already existing local signed languages. Kegl's policy was to document and study rather than to impose or change the language or its community. While she did not interfere with Deaf Nicaraguans gaining exposure to other signed languages, she did not introduce such opportunities herself. She has however, documented contact and influences with other signed languages that began as early as the 1990s and that continue to influence ISN as any languages in contact influence one another. American Sign Language (ASL, also Amslan obs. ...

Some experts have taken issue, however, with what they have identified as "the ethics of isolating the Nicaraguan children." Felicia Ackerman, Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, wrote a letter to the Times registering her objection. Regarding Kegl's fear of "kill[ing] indigenous language," Ackerman writes, "Evidently, she would rather kill the life prospects of these children, by leaving them unable to communicate with the outside world." In her defence, Kegl's organization Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects helped establish a Deaf school staffed entirely by Deaf Nicaraguan teachers, and has supported Deaf Nicaraguans in attending and presenting at international conferences.

Evidence for innate language capacities

William Stokoe, known by many as the father of American Sign Language linguistics, disagrees that the emergence of ISN is evidence of a language acquisition device. Stokoe also questions assertions that the language has emerged entirely without outside influence, from (for example), Spanish or ASL. At present, there is no final evidence available to resolve the controversy surrounding nativism vs. cultural learning, and the dispute reaches far into theoretical linguistics, where different approaches may conceptualize grammar in different and non-compatible ways. Even if the evidence collected thus far seems to indicate a lack of access to Spanish and ASL in the early emergence process, it remains a possibility that the development of ISN is facilitated by the speaker's exposure to more general communicative strategies in early infancy. Alternatives to theories proposing a language acquisition device have been presented by Michael Tomasello (among others). Tomasello argues that the process of acquiring a first language is boosted by non-linguistic communication, as in the establishment of joint intentional frames and in the understanding of communicative intentions. In any case, once ISN came into being, like all other languages it actively engaged in contact with other languages in its environment. William Stokoe (pronounced Stokie) (1919 - 2000) was a scholar who researched American Sign Language (ASL) extensively while he worked at Gallaudet University. ... The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a postulated organ of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language (ie. ... The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a postulated organ of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language (ie. ...

Nicaraguan Sign Language as "unwriteable"

R. Senghas (1997) used the phrase "unspeakable, unwriteable" language in the title of his dissertation to highlight the common misconception that those languages without a written form are not as "real" (a view often held by those who do not study indigenous languages). In a similar fashion, signed languages are often not given their proper recognition because they are not spoken or written. (Senghas has never claimed that Nicaraguan Sign Language is unwriteable, just that it was often thought as such by those who do not study sign languages). Generally, the influence literacy has upon the status of a language is also addressed in debates of the so-called "written language paradigm", where it is acknowledged that the availability of written language to some extent must be considered as a culturally and historically dependent phenomenon. Tim Ingold, a British anthropologist, discussed these matters at some length in "The Perception of the Environment" (2000), though he does not specifically deal with ISN. Since 1996, however, Nicaraguans have been writing their language both by hand and on computer using SignWriting (see http://www.signwriting.org and http://www.nslpinc.org for samples of written ISN). Currently, Nicaraguan Sign Language has the largest library of texts written in any signed language including three volumes of reading lessons in ISN, Spanish I and II (two levels of texts, workbooks and primers) and Cuentos Español (a collection of stories in Spanish with ISN glossaries), a geography text, and many others. A sign for photo model using SignWriting in the dictionary of the Flemish Sign Language Sign Writing is a system of writing the movements and handshapes of sign languages. ...

See also

• Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language

• Adamorobe Sign Language

• Yucatec Maya Sign Language

• Kata Kolok

• Martha's Vinyard

The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a sign language used by about 150 deaf and many hearing members of a Bedouin community in the Negev desert of southern Israel. ... Adamorobe Sign Language is an indigenous sign language used in Adamorobe, an Akan village in eastern Ghana. ... Yucatec Maya Sign Language is used in the Yucatán region in Mexico by both hearing and deaf members of a traditional Mayan community, where there there is an unusually high number of deaf inhabitants. ... Kata Kolok (literally deaf talk) is the name given to a sign language of a village in northern Bali which has had an extraordinarily high rate of deafness for several generations. ... Map of Marthas Vineyard. ...

External links

• 5 minute PBS documentary video showing examples of Nicaraguan Sign Language (Quicktime and Realplayer formats).
• http://www.unet.maine.edu/courses/NSLP/
• http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/forms/langs/LLDescription.cfm?code=NCS
• http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19991024mag-sign-language.html

QuickTime is a multimedia technology developed by Apple Computer, capable of handling various formats of digital video, sound, text, animation, music, and immersive panoramic (and sphere panoramic) images. ... RealPlayer is a media player, created by RealNetworks, that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, as well as multiple generations of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo codecs. ...

Further reading

• Kegl, J. 1994. Conference Report: Linguistic Society of America Meeting, January 6-9, 1994. Signpost. vol.7, no. 1, Spring, pp. 62-66.
• Kegl, J. 1994. The Nicaraguan Sign Language Project: An Overview. Signpost. vol.7, no. 1, Spring, pp. 24-31.
• Senghas, R., and J. Kegl. 1994a. Social Considerations in the Emergence of Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Sign Language). Signpost. vol.7, no. 1, Spring, pp. 40-46.
• Senghas, R., and J. Kegl. 1994b. Soziale Gesichtspunkte bei der Herausbildung der Nicaraguanishen Gebärdensprache. Das Zeichen, no. 29, September, pp. 288-293. [German translation of Senghas and Kegl (1994a)]
• Kegl, J. 2000. Is it soup yet? Or, When is it Language? In the Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar 1999. City University, London.
• Kegl, J. 2002. Language Emergence in a Language-Ready Brain: Acquisition Issues. In Morgan, G. and Woll, B., Language Acquisition in Signed Languages. Cambridge University Press, pp. 207-254.
• Kegl, J. 2004. Language Emergence in a Language-Ready Brain: Acquisition Issues. In Jenkins, Lyle, (ed), Biolinguistics and the Evolution of Language. John Benjamins.
• Kegl, J. (in press). The Case of Signed Languages in the Context of Pidgin and Creole Studies. In Singler, J. and Kouwenberg, S. (eds.), The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies. London: Blackwell's Publishers.
• Kegl, J. and G. Iwata. 1989. Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense: A Pidgin Sheds Light on the “Creole?” ASL. In Carlson, R., S. DeLancey, S. Gildea, D. Payne, and A. Saxena, (eds.). Proceedings of the Fourth Meetings of the Pacific Linguistics Conference. Eugene, Oregon: Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, pp. 266-294.
• Morford, J. P. & Kegl, J. 2000. Gestural precursors of linguistic constructs: How input shapes the form of language. In D. McNeill (Ed.), Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 358-387.
• Kegl J., Senghas A., Coppola M 1999. Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua. In M. DeGraff (ed), Comparative Grammatical Change: The Intersection of Language Acquisistion, Creole Genesis, and Diachronic Syntax, pp.179-237. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Polich, S 1998. Social agency and deaf communities: A Nicaraguan case study. University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. dissertation
• Senghas, R. J. 2003. New ways to be Deaf in Nicaragua: Changes in language, personhood, and community. In Monaghan, L, Nakamura, K., Schmaling, C., and Turner, G. H. (eds.), Many ways to be Deaf: International, linguistic, and sociocultural variation, pp. 260-282. Washington, DC. Gallaudet University Press,
• Senghas, R. J 1997. An 'unspeakable, unwriteable' language: Deaf identity, language & personhood among the first cohorts of Nicaraguan signers. University of Rochester, NY Ph.D. dissertation
• Shepard-Kegl, J. A. 1997. Prólogo. In Lopez Gomez, J.J., Peréz Castellon, A. M., Rivera Rostrán, J. M., and Baltodano Baltodano, J.F., (eds.), Diccionario del Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua. Managua: Asociación Nacional se Sordos de Nicaragua (ANSNIC), pp. ix-xi.
• Shepard-Kegl, J.M. 2002. Teaching Literacy to Deaf Students in Nicaragua: A Common Sense Two-Step Approach. Yarmouth, ME: NSLP, Inc. (downloadable at http://www.nslpinc.org/Download.html)