"Birth of a New Language in Nicaragua"
The short film “Birth of a New Language in Nicaragua” shows the adaptation of deaf individuals in Nicaragua; a nation which had not developed a sign language nor previously taught sign language in schools. Despite this, a form of sign language was created and is evolving into a new language altogether. Nicaragua’s Ministry of Education invited the U.S. linguist Judy Kegl to analyze the phenomenon which ultimately became an intricate study of what would be termed as Nicaraguan sign language.
At the beginning of the short documentary, Kegl introduces a woman Maria Noname, who learned to sign through her methods which included the gestures she created throughout her life. For the majority of her life, she had remained isolated from other deaf and sign capable people which made her example of sign crude and hard to understand by most who were sign language competent. The next scenes in the documentary showcased how the Nicaraguan education system has progressed to the point where they started Managua’s deaf school. This school was established as a way to get deaf children together that did not have any model for how a language worked. These people had previously been isolated from signed, spoken, and written language all their lives. Nevertheless, once the deaf children began to mingle and started to communicate in their free time using gestures; they began to utilize the signs they have acquired by the time they reach adolescence.
What surprised me the most was that there is a threshold for children to learn a new language and that successive generations of children have, on their own introduced new features to their sign abilities. Subsequently, I have discovered that language needs company, a community and some sort of a trigger element which can be the wanting to share information with each other. While the older students had more life experience, it was actually the younger kids that drove the language’s development. It is evident in the documentary that when the children interacted, instead of adapting their signs to fit an existing language, they developed something unique. Children automatically communicate using specific fundamental rules, even if they are not exposed to any pre-existing language. However, it is younger generations who have continued to refine them, forming an entirely new language with its own grammatical rules.
