Nicaraguan Sign Language
The story of the deaf Nicaraguan children who invented their own language
Nine months after Claudia Avila took her first breath, her world fell silent. The illness that had riddled her body as an infant spared her life but robbed her of the ability to hear—permanently. Remnants of her mother’s voice, of music, or of laughter were all that remained.
“My mom was worried about me when I was a baby because I was so sick,” said Avila, in an interview. “She took me to the hospital. The doctors made clapping noises, but I couldn’t hear them.”
Medicine was scarce for sick children who grew up during the Nicaraguan Revolution, a brutal conflict that spanned from the early 1960s to 1990. Common illnesses like ear infections and meningitis could cause permanent hearing loss if left untreated. Unfortunately, the decades-long war had plunged the country deep into poverty, depriving thousands of children like Avila from the medical care they needed.
Avila spent her youth isolated from others affected by hearing loss, as deaf communities in Nicaragua were almost nonexistent up until the revolution. As a result, she never learnt complex sign language. Instead, Avila spelled out words letter-by-letter with her hands. She had no idea that a little over a hundred miles away in Managua, the nation’s capital, deaf schoolchildren were not only forming their own community, but inventing their own sign language. Later named Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), it is the only case in recorded history of a language being created almost entirely from scratch.
Avila would only find out about this new language when she was nineteen years old. She was at home when she received a knock at the door from a man who she had never met before. Strangely, the man was American. He had a long, thin face, adorned with wiry metal glasses perched above a graying goatee. His name was James Shepard-Kegl, and he had helped establish a boarding school for deaf children in Bluefields, a city in southeastern Nicaragua. He had a proposition for Avila.
Shepard-Kegl offered Avila the chance to study at the boarding school, where Nicaraguan Sign Language was the standard language for all students and faculty. However, she would have to leave behind her family and the small town that she had known her entire life, only to be immersed in a language that was unlike anything she had ever seen before. The transition would be difficult, but Avila agreed. In 1999, she packed up her bags and boarded a plane to Bluefields.
It was a decision that would change her life forever.
An unprecedented language
Avila was greeted by a sea of grade schoolers dressed in smart white-collared uniforms when she arrived. She watched the children sign to each other effortlessly, their hands flitting and contorting so quickly that you might miss an entire sentence if you blinked. Shepard-Kegl lectured enthusiastically, either standing or sitting half-perched atop a table at the front of the classroom during lessons.
His arms swooped and carved the air as he narrated the great discoveries of Babar the Elephant and the sheer terror of Goldilocks coming face-to-face with three gargantuan bears. His signs conjured fantastical images in the minds of his students, but to Avila, his gestures were just that—gestures.
“I was a little bit shy and embarrassed because I was so new to signing still,” said Avila. “But I continued learning.”
Aside from learning the basic vocabulary, she would have to master the more difficult techniques of a language that had grown remarkably complex in merely thirty years. One such technique is spatial modulation, which allows the signer to modify the meaning of a word by adjusting where they perform the sign relative to their body. You can see an example of this in the pictures below by comparing the orientation of the signer on the left-hand side to their orientation on the right-hand side.
On the left, the signer makes the neutral signs for the verbs “see” (top-left) and “pay” (bottom-left). On the right, she makes the same signs, but this time on the left side of her body. This indicates that the same person was both seen and paid—a useful tool for distinguishing between multiple characters in a story, for example.
Spatial modulation was only one of the countless new additions to Nicaraguan Sign Language at the time. Younger speakers like Avila used it fluidly in conversation, but the people who invented the language never used spatial modulation at all. In that sense, NSL was like a time machine. By closely observing each generation of its speakers, you could watch a language evolve right before your eyes. This made it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for scientists.
Dr. Ann Senghas, a burgeoning psychologist from Massachusetts, was one of the few researchers to capitalize on this historic moment. She had been flying to Nicaragua every summer to document NSL since Avila was in elementary school, but even she had arrived late to the scene. The language had been born years earlier in the mid-1970s at a special education school in Managua, which had made national history by bringing hundreds of deaf Nicaraguan children together for the first time.
Since these children were forced to read teachers’ lips to understand lessons, the school had unintentionally created the perfect conditions for a more efficient mode of communication to develop. Playgrounds, lunchrooms, and school buses all became indispensable channels for students to share the gestures they’d invented with each other. What had begun as an eclectic smattering of motions eventually settled into a cohesive lexicon, like a vast network of tributaries melding into a single current.
“Nobody taught these people [the students] to sign,” said Senghas, in a lecture. “The teachers at the school used Spanish, which they couldn’t hear.”
The current of Nicaraguan Sign Language meandered but never stopped as it flowed from one generation of students to the next. Some signs died out while others remained for decades. A common set of grammar rules became widely adopted. The rise of regional dialects—while diversifying the vocabulary—frequently caused disputes when people from different parts of Nicaragua conversed.
Through thousands of interactions involving conflict and compromise, NSL was forced to evolve, subject to the same forces of natural selection that molded early primates into modern humans. In the words of Senghas:
We have two evolutionary processes on two really different time scales. We’ve got human reproduction and selection on one hand and language reproduction and selection on the other. … When languages reproduce, they send out all these accumulated symbols and patterns of combinations, but it’s a blurry and limited signal. … In the process of selection, it’s not the useful stuff but the learnable parts of the language that survive.
Although the younger generations determine which aspects of any language survive, it is only because of the oldest that they are birthed into existence at all. Since Nicaraguan Sign Language appeared “out of thin air”, to quote cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, some scientists have interpreted its development as strong evidence that humans possess an innate facility for learning and creating language.
Proponents of this theory argue that children would not be able to intuit language as quickly as they do without being born with a grasp of “universal grammar”. While this idea is still up for debate, Senghas and her team were able to shed light on the importance of community in the maturation of language. The researchers concluded that “neither children, nor adults—independent of each other—can create a language, but a community in which both are available … can provide the fertile ground out of which language grows.”
James Shepard-Kegl’s schoolhouse in Bluefields was as fertile a ground for Nicaraguan Sign Language as could be. He may not have developed the same intuition for NSL as those who were exposed to it as a toddler, but his strength lay in creating the environment for younger students to learn, to make mistakes, to befriend others like themselves, and to ultimately grow into capable adults unhindered by the shackles of linguistic isolation.
His efforts paid off. In the span of months, Avila had become fluent in NSL, able to narrate Babar the Elephant to a crowd of wide-eyed elementary schoolers with ease. Like her mentor, Avila began traveling across Nicaragua to locate and teach other deaf children about the language. When NSL was born, it was only used by several hundred students in Managua. Today, it is used by over 3,000 people in part due to the work of educators like Avila and Shepard-Kegl.
The growth of Nicaraguan Sign Language reveals what is possible when creativity is permitted to flourish, and when teachers learn from their students as much as their students learn from them. For Avila, her time at the school in Bluefields shaped not only how she expressed herself, but more importantly, the self that she had learnt to express.
“Now, what do I dream? I dream different stories,” said Avila. “I dream about how I want to dance. I dream about my boyfriend; someone to talk to. I dream about teaching little kids so they can get bigger, get married, and have their own lives.”
For years, Avila’s passions had been trapped by what she had lost at only nine months old. Nicaraguan Sign Language had simply opened the door.
View our sources for this piece here.
Wow. This was great and really inspirational. I had never heard of this before. You have a knack for digging into things that are completely off my radar. Thank you.