In 1977, a special-education center opened in Managua with 50 deaf children. Enrollment reached 400 across two schools by 1983. Teachers drilled the students in spoken Spanish and lipreading, "with most pupils failing to grasp the concept of Spanish words," according to Wikipedia. The plan failed, but "the schoolyard, the street, and the school bus provided fertile ground for them to communicate with one another" — and by combining gestures and home signs, the children rapidly built Nicaraguan Sign Language.
The staff, unable to understand their students, "saw the children's gesturing as mime and a failure to acquire Spanish" and asked for outside help. In June 1986, Nicaragua's Ministry of Education brought in Judy Kegl, an American Sign Language linguist from MIT. Her team noticed that the youngest children had taken the older kids' system to "a higher level of complexity, with verb agreement and other conventions of grammar."
Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, said "it's the only time that we've seen a language being created out of thin air." Since 1996, deaf Nicaraguans have written the language using SignWriting — there are now reading textbooks, story collections, and a geography text in it.
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