This video was made possible by Curiosity
Stream. Get the CuriosityStream/Nebula bundle deal
for an all-time low sale price of $1 a month at CuriosityStream.com/HAI. So, in the late 1970s, the dastardly Sandinistas
came to power in Nicaragua and decided to do something evil and frankly rather disgusting:
provide education for all the children. This cruel, red-led literary crusade forced
kids out of the household and into life-sized centers for Kids Who Can’t Read Good; which
resulted not only in kids reading gooder, but also in them developing a new language
from scratch. You see, until the 1970s, Nicaragua had no
real deaf community—which meant isolated deaf children’s only means of communication
were whatever rudimentary, mimic-styled signs they invented to communicate needs to their
usually hearing families. But then, the Sandinistas took deaf 4 to 16-year
olds, put them together in the country’s first deaf schools, and brought in Eastern
German educators to teach the kids Spanish sign language, which mostly involved teaching
them how to use letter signs to spell out Spanish words. This wasn’t very useful, though, largely
because the deaf kids had never been taught to read, so they didn’t have a clear concept
of what a word was… or what a letter was… and also, importantly, they did not speak
Spanish… because again, they were deaf. Rather than listening with their eyes to how
their teachers wanted them to communicate, the children did something far cooler and
Half as Interestinger: they started to communicate amongst themselves. Because of the unusual confluence of circumstances—they
were all coming from isolated villages, without knowing how to read, and without ever being
taught to speak any other language—that meant they had to invent a completely new
language from scratch at the same age as when most of us were putting crayons into places
they didn’t belong. Now, it’s tough to identify when a new language
is taking shape right in front of your eyes, but luckily for us, the ignored and unsuccessful
teachers called for backup. Unable to get through to the children, but
recognizing that the kids were communicating with one another, Nicaraguan education officials
brought in a cunning American linguist, Judy Kegl, in 1986, to figure out what the kids
were talking about. To make sense of what these kids were saying
in a language disconnected from any established dialect, Kegl basically had to make a Rosetta
stone: to get the kids to communicate something in their sign language that she already knew
in her own language. So, pre-empting the 8 million movie recap
podcasts that now plague the world, she showed each student a 90-second cartoon and then
filmed them describing what they had just watched. Once she translated it, she had two findings. First, this language wasn’t just a bunch
of vocab bundled together—this language had rules. Take, for example, their sign for “speak.” At first, it was simple: a hand opening and
closing in front of their mouth. But then, they changed it, so that they would
start the sign with the hand open at the speaker’s position, but move it forward to the position
of the person being addressed, where they would close it. That little motion is a huge deal—by incorporating
information about the subject and object of a verb, the kids had intuited the concept
of verb agreement, which is pretty impressive considering that you, the viewer, do not know
what verb agreement is. The second thing she found was that the older
children, the original architects of this language, leaned on rather rudimentary signing—only
a few signs to describe the whole clip—while the younger students signed more complicated,
time-sensitive summaries of the cartoon. This told her that the language was growing
and maturing from one generation to the next. Ultimately, she was able to separate the language’s
development into three stages. First were the home signs—a few basic signs,
usually just acting something out, that each kid had developed in their own individual
home with their usually hearing parents. When the deaf kids came together, though,
they sort of combined all their home signs to develop a basic pidgin—not the kind Piers
Morgan fed in Home Alone 2, but a limited, simplified language traditionally used to
communicate between people who don’t share a common tongue. That basic pidgin was called Lenguaje de Signos
Nicaragense, which according to Google, translates to “About 899,000 results.” But the key component came next—younger
students came in, quickly mastered the basic pidgin developed by the older students, and
then without even meaning to, elevated it to a real, full-on language, which linguists
called the idioma, or Nicaraguan Sign Language. Now, all this suggested that groups of young
children possess a semi-mystical, unconscious, and incredibly powerful ability to not only
understand, but develop language—something that we kind of already knew based on how
good kids are at coming up with new ways to make fun of adults. By continually communicating with each other,
adjusting, and innovating, they come to consensus about adopting new signs, dropping others,
and developing a grammatical system. It’s one of humankind’s most remarkable
abilities, rivaled only by the ability to eat 75 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Because people can never just let a nice thing
be nice, this example was quickly jumped on by experts to prove various linguistic theories,
including the highly controversial concept of innate speaker capacity. It’s a theory developed by linguist and
anarchist Dumbledore Noam Chomsky, which argues that grammar is in part a function of innate
human genetics—that there is a universal grammar programmed into our DNA—which in
part explains both why children are so incredibly good at learning language, and why all human
languages share relatively similar structures. In the end, the point is that I couldn’t
think of a good ending for this video, so here’s the sign the kids came up with for
raccoon. While I don’t know any other cool vocab
or how to end my videos, I do know that we made a Nebula Plus companion video to this
compiling all the jokes we cut because they were lame, rude, or too long. I also know that CuriosityStream is currently
hosting a massive Earth Day sale where subscriptions are 41% off—which comes out well under a
dollar a month. And then I also know that any CuriosityStream
subscription initiated at CuriosityStream.com/HAI includes a free Nebula subscription. And therefore I know that now is the perfect
time to sign up if you haven’t already. Also, on CuriosityStream, you can, for example,
learn about how past societies pulled off marvelous projects like the Pyramids or the
Great Wall of China in Ancient Engineering. If you’re still in the mood for more documentaries
after that, you can also check our new Nebula Original profiling an Alaskan community struggling
to hold on after the shutdown of the cruise ship industry. This Earth Day deal ends this Sunday, so sign
up today for a year of CuriosityStream and Nebula for less than a dollar a month at CuriosityStream.com/HAI.
Near the end of this video they refer to the innate language faculty and Chomsky in general as "highly controversial" but kind of leave it there. Another commenter here told me recently that the Universal Grammar is pretty widely accepted by linguists today.. so can any researchers shed light on what if anything is still considered controversial in Chomsky's li guistic work?
As a Nicaraguan, I'm glad that the spotlight is being shined on this and is getting the attention it deserves. I just wish it hadn't been introduced with the sarcastic implication that the Sandinistas were good guys...