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Deaf Children Invent Language
gmuslera writes "According to this story, Nicaraguan deaf kids, without knowing any existing sign language, invented their own language on their own, and it keeps evolving. Is this going in the same way as Varley's The Persistence of Vision?"
This phenomenon is so common that such languages have a name: Creole.
The old Lingua Franca was on the verge of becoming such a creole language before being superceded by the Lingua Francais, and there are a number of creoles spoken by millions, such as Swahili.
Or English.
KFG
no one has ever rigorously established that none of the kids had any prior exposure to sign language.
And how exactly would one rigorously establish this? Follow the kids around with a camera from birth to make sure no-one signs around them?
First of all, we need to make clear that there is no such thing as "sign language". Rather, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different sign languages, originating wherever there are deaf communities. Secondly, in Nicaragua at the time the schools for the deaf were prohibited from teaching any of the existing sign languages, since it was believed that the deaf should learn to read lips so that they could communicate "normally". This was of course a rousing failure, since so many different phonemes look the same when reading lips. I can imagine this problem is particularly prominent with Spanish, given its relatively small number of vowel sounds compared to English and its lack of the English tendency to close off vowel sounds with a telltale rounding of the lips.
Anyway, since they weren't able to communicate at all via lip-read Spanish, these children needed some means to communicate with each other and with their parents. It is true that sometimes these children would learn a few pantomimed gestures from their parents, but this is not the same thing as a signed language-- first, because none of the pantomime gestures necessarily resemble any of the accepted symbols in an existing sign language, and second, because these were only a few individual signs with no overriding structure. Claiming these children learned a "sign language" from their parents would be like claiming my dog knows English. Furthermore, prior to the reforms which led to the schools of the deaf being founded in Nicaragua, deafness was attached a social stigma. Deaf children were kept isolated from the rest of society and treated as if they were mentally incompetent, with no attempts being made to teach them.
At any rate, the most any one deaf child was likely to learn were a few made-up gestures, and these were unique to each deaf individual and his or her family, since before the opening of the schools for the deaf the deaf children had no opportunity to socialize with one another. When the deaf schools did open, the children forged their own pidgin out of the few gestures they knew, making up more symbols of their own. When this pidgin was passed to new students below the critical age for language learning, it became a fully grammatical language, a creole.
The symbols and structure of Nicaraguan Sign Language are different enough from those of other sign languages, and the opportunity for the children to be exposed to them is small enough, that it is extremely unlikely that other signed languages contributed any role to the formation of NSL.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
(Note: I didn't RTFA, but I am in linguistics and I have read articles on this subject before.)
I don't think you understand the point.
There had been no systematic education of deaf children in Nicaragua prior to 1979. At that point, they sent all of the deaf children in the country to two schools in Managua. Though all of the kids had some rudimentary signs that had been developed independently within each of their families, they did not have a language, really. They had gestures for communication without syntax.
Though attempts were made to teach these kids spanish finger-spelling (which for various reasons is not regarded as an actual sign language) none were successful. And yet, the teachers saw blatant communication going on between the children: they had adapted signs into a system which they all understood to varying degrees.
The interesting thing, though, was that whereas the older children, who had gone longer without having access to a linguistically-rich environment rarely linked more than a few signs together and showed only a rudimentary syntax (their signing has been categorized as a "pidgin"), the younger children's language evolved into something much more complex. The language they use includes the use of agreement between subject and object (it has something to do with the placement of the signs in space relative to eachother. I am no expert on sign language, but this is apparently something demonstrated by all other sign languages.)
The point is that, whereas the older children, who had passed out of their language-acquisition period, spoke in a manner which could almost be compared to the signing of chimps (even if that sounds horrible and the claims of language in non-human primates are dubious), the younger children created a generative, varied system which included a rule-based system of grammar. So whereas the older kids would be limited to sentences like, "pour coffee," the younger ones would be able to create ones like "Damn it, I shouldn't have stayed out all last night partying because now I have to stay up and study. Pour me a cup of coffee, would you?"
So no, they didn't have to come up with the concept of a sign language, but they did have to come up with the rules from scratch. It's nothing like the fact that teenagers create their own slang.