The Birth of New Sign Language in Nicaragua

Nicaragua Central America Managua here as in other places of the world there are those who hardly have any language at all Maria Nanami Mary no-name deaf since birth she has been isolated all her life both from the people who could help her and from others with her disability her friend linguist judy Kegel understands the depth of her isolation the two can communicate just a little using simple and primitive gestures the first time I met her she was missing the ability to tell me who she was she was missing the ability to tell me how old she was she doesn't know her name in order to tell me who she was she had to take me home and show me the papers and pictures of her family we had to share a context she can tell me things I can show you a bit she can tell me what happened to her father well I asked her about her father dying and she said three okay what three meant was she was shot three times I know this from working with the other deaf sign earth at GZA was shot in three places and that's how her father died right Yeah right and you know but but three is just not enough to give me access to the information that I would have needed had I not had prior knowledge about that uh-huh okay what she's saying is I had a daughter that went away and got married and that was it she never came back I had a son that went away and I never heard from him again you know that's it I'm alone that's my life she was language ready the problem was she didn't get access to language within that critical period and that critical window for learning language in the way that we learned it is closed this window for language remains open until we reach age seven then it slowly closes as we advance towards puberty before the 1980s many deaf Nicaraguans we're like Mary no-name they never encountered the window for language because they never encountered others with their disability but in 1980 after the Nicaraguan revolution the new government tried to enhance deaf people's lives it brought deaf village children into Managua to end their isolation here educators tried to teach them an existing sign language the effort failed the children showed a little interest in learning a language forced upon them instead they began communicating with each other in their own way Judy Kegel was someone from the United States to sort out the problem I came down thinking wherever there were deaf people there was a sign language and that obviously there would be a full-blown sign language in full swing here in Nicaragua and this I said well you know I can learn a bit of their sign language if that's what you want and work with you on learning it listen no they don't have a sign language I know they have that mimic us they have mime gestures and they pointed to a group of kids and said we want to know what they're talking about it turned out they were talking about a lot more than anyone dreamed possible Cagle had arrived in Nicaragua shortly after the birth of a new language language needs company language needs a community language needs some sort of a trigger and I think that I think that trigger is it's not so much that it needs a community in the sense that there have to be lots of people but a commit part of being a community is wanting to share information with each other might this moment resemble what happened around 50,000 years ago the turning point that led to the explosion of human creativity language does not need a voice it is our legacy an inevitability of being human today we still don't know exactly when language evolved when it opened the door to our phenomenal success as a species this is a verb or duplicated but language every language depends on strict rules all of them familiar role shifts to looking at being looking at the bird then back to the man falling off the mountain have dreaming that he's gonna fly like a bird where many species can communicate even vocalize only human languages are driven by complex rules every one of our world's 6300 languages has them we call them syntax in her isolation Mary no name never encountered syntax but it is commonplace in the children's language syntax isn't the set of rules that you learned in your third grade grammar that you had to memorize so you spoke English the way you're supposed to syntax is or language the constraints on language or something that all human beings share they're the constraints that are imparted to us by the fact that we share a single human brain they are the not just the constraints but the ability to hierarchically organized information that allows us to construct sentences novel sentences that have never been said before that allows us to put it to to tell a story that allows us to prophesy that allows us to lie I can sheerly communicate for communications sake when I have syntax then I can truly use the language you those most gifted with the tools of language might have been the ones to prosper according to

Channel: prosario2000

Views: 186,377

Keywords: language, Nicaragua, sign, evolution

Id: pjtioIFuNf8

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2009