Analysis Of Nicaraguan Sign Language

Many linguists have long pondered the question of whether human language has emerged due to some innate quality of the human brain, or if they are a cultural artifact learned over time specifically for the purpose of communication. Evidence provided by emergent human languages, specifically Nicaraguan Sign Language and Al-Sayyid Bedouin sign language, provide critical insight into this debate. This evidence suggests that human language is an innate ability that can develop even in the absence of any cultural transmission, and yet is still a fundamentally social practice.
In his book, The Language Instinct (2003), Steven Pinker writes that language is not a cultural artifact, instead it is a unique biological trait of our brains. This view of …show more content…
However, these novel languages emerge in settings with the right environment and social pressure for a language to emerge - highly social environments where a number of individuals engage in the same system of homesign. Nicaraguan sign language (ISN) was born out of these cultural pressures, providing researchers with the unique opportunity to study the origins of language, language evolution, and universal grammar (Sedivy, 2014). Before the 1970s, deaf people in Nicaragua had very few opportunities to interact, generally growing up in hearing families with little to no access to broader education or resources for the deaf. In 1977, a school for the deaf was founded in Managua, and over the next few years many other schools opened, bringing together hundreds of deaf children and adolescents in the area. Educators in these schools did not try to teach the children American Sign Language or any other sign language system, instead attempting to teach the students to speak and understand Spanish via lip-reading. These attempted failed miserably, but students began to spontaneously use their homesign systems with each other during recess and after school. After a short period, a standardized system of homesign emerged and as this new Nicaraguan Sign Language was passed down to younger children, it began to refine and improve. …show more content…
Smaller communities will share more contextual knowledge, which will place less pressure on the language to develop the need to express complex information or fine distinctions. This means that a language will develop more slowly in a smaller community and if small enough, may cease to develop beyond the most basic of structures. The effects of shared cultural context on language development can be seen in the language of the Pirahã people of the Amazon (Everett, 2008). Daniel Everett, who initially studied the Pirahã language discovered that it lacked color words, numerals and recursion. Everett posits that the explanation for this is due to the fact that the speakers of Pirahã share enough cultural context to not necessitate these features, termed the 'immediacy of experience' principle