The Invention of Nicaraguan Sign Language

Introduction In the 1980s, Nicaragua was a poor country, lacking in specialist resources and with low levels of literacy even amongst the hearing population, and was a country in which the deaf had no sign language. If a brand new sign language were to be created from scratch, it is hardly likely that children with no language capacity to begin with were going to be the ones to do it. So linguists and psychologists were shocked when it was reported that in the 1980s, in Nicaragua, without even the awareness let alone assistance of adults, deaf children themselves had invented a brand new sign-language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), linguistically distinct both from spoken Spanish and other sign languages ‒ a fully-fledged language with syntax and the capacity to reference abstract concepts and hypothetical or distant events. Since the children had no access to any language ‒ spoken Spanish or sign language, and mostly not even written Spanish ‒ it seemed impossible that they should have been able to acquire a language, let alone collectively invent one, unaided, from scratch – the only recorded case of the creation of an entirely new language, as opposed to a dialect or a creole of existing languages. “[Normal speech] development is achieved,” said Lev Vygotsky, “under particular conditions of interaction with the environment, where the final or ideal form [of speech] ... is not only already there in the environment and from the very start in contact with the child, but actually interacts and exerts a real influence on the primary form, on the first steps of the child’s development.” It follows from this that a deaf child will not