How did Nicaraguan Sign Language emerge?

Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) arose when deaf children and adolescents who had no shared language were brought together in special education schools in Managua in the late 1970s. They brought personal gesture systems called homesigns, and by interacting daily they converged on a common system. Each new group of young learners then reshaped it. Researchers regard it as one of the few established sign languages whose creation by a deaf community scholars have been able to study. [1] [2]

Before this period there was no deaf community or sign language in Nicaragua, so the first deaf students did not learn a sign language from older signers. The community formed as two centers for special education and vocational training expanded in Managua. According to Wikipedia, a vocational school for deaf adolescents opened in 1980, and by 1983 more than 400 deaf pupils were enrolled in the two schools. [3] [4]

The schools' teaching plan stressed spoken Spanish and lipreading, with teachers' signing limited to fingerspelling. Wikipedia reports that this achieved little, and most pupils did not grasp the concept of Spanish words. The pupils stayed linguistically cut off from their teachers, but the schoolyard, the street and the school bus gave them places to communicate with one another. [4] [1]

Homesigners are deaf people who cannot acquire a spoken language and have not had enough contact with a deaf community to learn a sign language, yet develop gestures as their main way of communicating. The children who entered the Managua schools brought such systems, which were idiosyncratic and probably varied a great deal in structure and complexity. Within a relatively short time the signers converged on a rudimentary sign language, which then became the input for deaf children who joined later. One source describes the signs and sign combinations from home as the seeds of the new language. [3] [1]

Marie Coppola of the University of Chicago noted that there is no videotape of the earliest years, 1978 to 1986, so studying homesign systems offers a clue to what NSL looked like at its start. A review in PubMed Central likewise treats homesign as the first step in the evolution of sign language structure. [1] [2]

Researchers describe the language's transmission in cohorts: signers who joined before 1983 are Cohort 1, those from 1984 to 1993 are Cohort 2, and so on. Coppola notes these labels are for analysis only, and signers in fact mix freely across them. [3]

A 2004 study in Science by Ann Senghas, Sotaro Kita and Asli Özyürek found that children in the early cohorts broke complex events into basic elements and arranged them into hierarchically structured expressions, in ways not seen in the gestures that accompany Spanish speech. Later cohorts extended this, turning the signing from a gestural form into a linguistic system. The authors propose that children naturally have learning abilities that give language its fundamental structure. A review adds that the second cohort's innovations came mainly from people who joined the community as children rather than adults, although the initial formation likely involved children, adolescents and adults together. [5] [2]