Nicaraguan Sign Language (Long)

[Grant Barrett]

Incredibly interesting article about Nicaraguan Sign Language,
Idioma de Signos Nicaragens, for which I will break my personal
no-posting-whole-stories rule.

>From http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19991024mag-sig
n-language.html


A Linguistic Big Bang

For the first time in history, scholars are witnessing the birth
of a language ˜ a complex sign system being created by deaf
children in Nicaragua.

By LAWRENCE OSBORNE Photographs by SUSAN MEISELAS

At the Escuelita de Bluefields, 9-year-old Yuri Mejia signing
the story of Babar: The young elephant is riding on his mother's
back (left) when she is shot. He runs away (center) and then
dissolves into tears (right).

When the Greek historian Herodotus was traveling in Egypt, he
heard of a bizarre experiment conducted by a King named
Psammetichus. The inquisitive monarch, wrote Herodotus, decided to wall up
two baby boys in a secluded compound. Whatever came out of the
boys' mouths, reasoned the King, would be the root language of our
species ˜ the key to all others. Herodotus tells us that
eventually the children came up with the Phrygian word for bread, bekos.
In addition to demonstrating the superiority of the Phrygian
tongue, the King's inquiry proved that even if left to their own
devices, children wouldn't be without language for long. We are born,
Herodotus suggested, with the gift of gab.

Ever since, philosophers have dreamed of repeating
Psammetichus's test. If children grew up isolated on a desert island, would
they develop a bona fide language? And if so, would it resemble
existing tongues? Yet only someone with the conscience of a Josef
Mengele would carry out such an experiment. Then, in the
mid-1980's, linguists were confronted with an unexpected windfall.
Psammetichus's experiment was repeated, but this time it came about
unintentionally. And not in Egypt but in Nicaragua.

Lawrence Osborne is the author of "Paris Dreambook," a
travelogue, and "The Poisoned Embrace," a collection of essays.

Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the newly installed
Nicaraguan Government inaugurated the country's first large-scale
effort to educate deaf children. Hundreds of students were
enrolled in two Managua schools. Not being privy to the more than 200
existing sign languages used by hearing-impaired people around the
world, Managua's deaf children started from ground zero. They had
no grammar or syntax ˜ only crude gestural signs developed
within their own families. These pantomimes, which deaf kids use to
communicate basic needs like "eat," "drink" and "ice cream," are
called mimicas in Spanish.

Most of the children arrived in Managua with only a limited
repertory of mimicas. But once the students were placed together,
they began to build on one another's signs. One child's gesture
solidified into the community's word. The children's inexperienced
teachers ˜ who were having paltry success communicating with their
profoundly deaf students ˜ watched in awe as the kids began
signing among themselves. A new language had begun to bloom.

A decade later, the children's creation has become a sensation
of modern linguistics. Nicaraguan Sign Language (known to experts
as I.S.N., for Idioma de Signos Nicaragense) has been patiently
decoded by outside scholars, who describe an idiom filled with
curiosities yet governed by the same "universal grammar" that the
linguist Noam Chomsky claims structures all language. Steven
Pinker, author of "The Language Instinct," sees what happened in
Managua as proof that language acquisition is hard-wired inside the
human brain. "The Nicaraguan case is absolutely unique in history,"
he maintains. "We've been able to see how it is that children ˜
not adults ˜ generate language, and we have been able to record it
happening in great scientific detail. And it's the first and
only time that we've actually seen a language being created out of
thin air."

anagua's deaf children were stranded in school, not on a desert
island. Spanish-speaking teachers were there to guide them. Yet
it turns out that Nicaraguan Sign Language doesn't resemble
Spanish at all. Indeed, the Managua teachers say they left hardly an
imprint on the children's improvised language ˜ largely because
their lack of experience led them to adopt poor pedagogy. When the
schools first opened, the Sandinista education officials were
misguidedly urged by Soviet advisers to adopt "finger spelling,"
which uses simple signs to limn the alphabets of spoken languages.
This approach was a disaster. Because the students had no prior
concept of words (let alone letters), it proved fruitless to try to
communicate in this fashion. The children remained linguistically
disconnected from their teachers.

This failure to adopt a workable teaching strategy,
paradoxically, gave the Nicaraguan children an opportunity to erect a
linguistic structure of their own. Indeed, the frustrated Managua
teachers began to notice that although the children could barely
communicate with their instructors, they were beginning to communicate
well among themselves, using a sign system that no teacher
recognized. But what, exactly, was it?



In June 1986, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education contacted
Judy Kegl, an American sign-language expert at Northeastern
University. They invited her to visit the deaf schools in Managua and see
if she could shed some light on the enigma. Armed with notebooks
and a Pentax camera ˜ and a vague tenderness for the revolution
˜ the 33-year-old Kegl set off for Managua.

Her first stop was Villa Libertad, a vocational school for deaf
teen-agers. Kegl, now a professor at the University of Southern
Maine in Portland, set out to make a rudimentary dictionary of the
signs being used by a small group of adolescent girls in a
hairdressing workshop. Some signs were obvious enough: objects like
"eyebrow tweezers" and "rolling curlers" were signed by more or
less imitating the things themselves. But one day, a student
playfully tested a more intricate sign on her. She first laid out her
left palm flat; then, using her right hand, she traced a line from
the middle finger to the base of the palm, turning her right hand
over afterward and pointing below her belt. As a result of the
girl's giggling, Kegl guessed that the sign meant "sanitary
napkin." She had learned her first word in what seemed to be a simple
form of communication.

After a few days, Kegl figured out the sign for "house" and
could combine it with a typical Nicaraguan gesture for "What's up?" ˜
a strong wrinkle of the nose ˜ to ask the deaf students where
they lived. The students' responses, however, were baffling. Each
student would produce a series of complex but apparently
meaningless hand wriggles. Only later would Kegl figure out that these
wriggles were in fact precise descriptions of Managua's labyrinthine
bus routes. Indeed, the grammar underlying this enigmatic sign
system completely eluded her. "I felt like I was failing as a
linguist," she recalls. "I couldn't find any consistent regularities.
It seemed to be complete chaos."

Three weeks later, however, Kegl moved on to the primary school,
known as San Judas, where younger children were being taught. On
the first day, she observed a young girl named Mayela Rivas
signing in a courtyard. Her gestures were rapid and had an eerie
rhythmic consistency. Kegl sensed that Mayela was not just making
crude mimicas or the kind of signed pidgin practiced by the older
students at Villa Libertad.

"I looked at her, and I thought to myself, Holy cow, that girl
is using some kind of rule book," she says. Ann Senghas, a former
assistant of Kegl's who is now a professor at Barnard College,
shares her wonder. "It was a linguist's dream," she says. "It was
like being present at the Big Bang."

To crack the code used by the younger San Judas children, Kegl
had them retell stories of Mr. Koumal, a popular Czech cartoon
character. To relate the contents of a Koumal picture book, the
children would need a variety of syntactic constructions and verb
senses. In "Mr. Koumal Flies Like a Bird," for example, the
adventurous Czech makes wings for himself by stealing chicken feathers.
But after he crashes into a mountainside, Mr. Koumal uses the
feathers to make Indian headdresses he can sell to children. By
having the children reconstruct these stories in their own tongue,
telltale regularities emerged that, bit by bit, provided Kegl with
clues to the language's grammar.

Anselmo Aleman, now 20, didn't come to Bluefields until he was
15, a relatively late start. "I was like Babar in the big city
going in the elevator for the first time," he says.

It was noticeable at once that the younger children used signs
in a more nuanced way than the older students. For example, the
teen-age pidgin signers at Villa Libertad had a basic gesture for
"speak" ˜ opening and closing four fingers and a thumb in front of
the mouth. The younger children used the same sign, but
modulated it, opening their fingers at the position of the speaker and
closing them at the position of the addressee. To Kegl, this
apparently small difference had enormous implications. "This was verb
agreement," she says, "and they were all using it fluently."
Similarly, in retelling the Koumal story, the younger kids could
express what linguists call "spatial agreement" with their verbs. When
they used the verb "to fall" ˜ as in "Mr. Koumal falls down the
mountain" ˜ they made a link between Mr. Koumal's falling and
what he was falling down. These nuanced signers would first lift one
hand in the air to signify "mountaintop" and then begin the sign
for "fall" from this height, flipping the hand back and forth
while moving it down an imaginary slope.

What explained this difference between the younger and older
signers? Kegl's theory, which has been disseminated in various
linguistic journals, is that an original group of home signers came up
with an elemental pidgin among themselves, known to linguists as
Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragense. This was the comparatively crude
signing she had observed among the older students. Then, very
young children of 5 or 6 had come into the school system. Quickly
mastering the pidgin from their elder peers, they had then taken
it, quite unconsciously, to a far higher level. This second
version was the fast, elegantly orchestrated language that Kegl had
seen flying from the little fingers of Mayela Rivas. This was what
would become known as the idioma, or Nicaraguan Sign Language.
These three quite distinct levels ˜ home signs, the lenguaje and the
idioma ˜ represent phases of evolution, from pantomime to pidgin
to language. "Real language in this case," she says, "only
emerged with young children first exposed to a signed pidgin."

But how did Nicaraguan Sign Language evolve in the first place?
Kegl likens the process to a field of stones waiting to be made
into a fence. The "stones" in this case came from the gesture
system that speaking Nicaraguans use in daily life. Hence, the first
deaf signs for "eat" and "drink" were close to those used by
hearing speakers: a flat hand with the fingers bending back and forth
before the mouth for "eat"; a thumb gesturing toward the mouth
for "drink."

"What happens," Kegl explains, "is that these gestures become
gradually richer and more varied. But we can't see the leap between
them and the first signs of language because the grammar is
inside the child. It manifests itself only as the child is exposed to
this ever-richer mix of odds and ends." This ability to organize
a heap of stones into a fence lies within the brain itself, and
is apparently stimulated by interaction with other children.

"We see these children coming to some kind of unconscious
consensus about which signs to use and which ones to drop," she
continues. "But we can't explain it fully; we can just witness the
outcome. There's an element of mystery in the way in which each child
adapts to and then changes the language." The very youngest
children, Kegl theorizes, filter the linguistic jumble around them
differently and then transmit their inventions, deformations and
additions back to the larger group. In this way, new words enter the
lexicon. "Yet there's no dominant alpha speaker who leads the
way," she adds. "Each child gives birth to a kind of individual
dialect, which is then pooled among the others according to a
process that we don't fully understand."

'I can remember my childhood,' Aleman signs, 'but I can also
remember not having any way to communicate.' His palm wipes his
forehead, suggesting someone erasing a blackboard.

After more than a decade of study, Kegl and Ann Senghas have
mapped out an idiom striking in its flexibility. Verbs, for example,
can be stretched like a rubber band to include all kinds of
nouns and prepositions. In the story "Mr. Koumal Flies Like a Bird,"
children line up to give the wily Czech an egg each in exchange
for one of his Indian headdresses. This action is expressed by a
single verb sign in which the hand turns up in an egg shape,
bounces twice away from the body and then turns sharply upward. This
one sign would be literally translated in English as "each person
in a row of individuals gives an egg-shaped object to an adult."
Even more oddly, prepositions in Nicaraguan Sign Language
function much like verbs. Hence, where an English speaker would say,
"The cup is on the table," a Nicaraguan signer will sign something
like, "Table cup ons." Verbs and prepositions are therefore
protean in a way that resembles only a few spoken languages, like
Navajo.

With all of these idiosyncrasies, it is easy to forget that
Nicaraguan Sign Language is but the accidental creation of children.
Indeed, adult-engineered idioms like Esperanto seem pallid by
comparison. As Kegl marvels, "No linguist could create a language
with half the complexity or richness that a 4-year-old could give
birth to."

Little Yuri Mejia is 9 years old and has been deaf from birth.
Under the mango trees of the Parque Reyes in Bluefields, a remote
port city on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast, she peers down into an
ornamental pool filled with tiny baby alligators. She is neatly
dressed in her pressed navy skirt and symmetrical pigtails. With
facial expressions and hand gestures working simultaneously, she
turns out crisp, twinkling sentences at lightning speed. Her face
slips and slides, moving from clownlike frowns to delicate nose
wrinkles. Yuri is one of the youngest pupils at the Escuelita de
Bluefields, an experimental school that Judy Kegl and her husband,
James Shepard-Kegl, have been running since 1995.

Because she was educated so early, Yuri signs with a fluent
grace. "When are the alligators going to wake up?" she signs to me
through James Shepard-Kegl, who has agreed to act as my translator.
"Every time I come to the park they're asleep."

With Shepard-Kegl's help, I ask her if she likes school.

"At home," she signs back quickly, "I'm bored. I live with my
grandmother. It's way over there in the barrio. We sit around, and
we're bored all the time. We do a lot of laundry. But at school,
everyone's deaf, so I can talk to them. And I can read a book
about Babar."

Bursting with curiosity, she then asks me where I live. The one
Nicaraguan sign I have mastered on my second day in Bluefields is
the one for New York. You put your forefinger against your
forehead three times to imitate the tiara spikes of Lady Liberty and
then raise your arm in a fist.

"Do you live with your grandmother, too?" Yuri asks.

"No."

"Do you know who Babar is?"

"Yes, of course."

"His mommy was killed in the forest, and he came to the town and
went up an elevator." She nods wisely. "Babar went up and down
in the elevator," she signs.

To make the sign for Babar, Yuri holds up four fingers (the sign
for "B"), touches her nose with her thumb and quickly dips the
hand down to describe an elephant's trunk. To convey the
elevator's movement, she forms a platform with her left hand upon which
she plants two fingers of her right hand in an inverted V: a person
standing on an elevator floor. She then moves the "elevator" up
and down.

Yuri and I head to the school's dormitory on the waterfront. The
pink house sits on a winding alley of cracked paving stones from
which the moody Bluefields lagoon can be seen. Inside, 15
students between the ages of 10 and 25 relax on homemade bunk beds,
entertained by a television set with the sound turned off. There, I
meet the Bluefields family one by one. The students range from
Daphney, a freckled 15-year-old who recently broke her leg turning
cartwheels, to 11-year-old Barney, a vivacious boy with shells
twisted into his hair who began signing the language as a baby.

Immediately curious about the newcomer, they cast about for a
name sign for me. Sign-language names are not phonetic but visual.
One boy raised his hand to signify height. (I am 6 foot 5,
gigantic by Nicaraguan standards.) Another offered a personalized twist
on the sign for "journalist": a miming of a microphone passing
from mouth to mouth. Finally, however, by dinnertime the matter
was settled otherwise. One girl put a finger vertically against her
chin, and amid a burst of laughter, I was christened "Dimple."

Many of these whimsical name signs are perceptive. The one for
Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's former Sandinista President, for
example, is one hand tapping the opposing wrist to signify Ortega's
flashy Rolex watch, a loud symbol for a poor deaf child. Fidel
Castro is a wagging, sermonizing finger combined with a V-sign near
the mouth to suggest smoking a cigar. Signs for many nouns are
similarly expressive: a wriggling hand for "fish" or fingers shooting
like pistols for "Texas." Verbs, by contrast, can seem elegantly
esoteric. To say "to look for," the left hand is first held flat
with the palm facing downward; then the pinkie, index finger and
thumb of the right hand are extended while the two remaining
fingers brush the back of the left hand repeatedly.

The Bluefields schoolhouse is a simple, one-room building with
maize-yellow walls. The curriculum varies from elementary word
recognition for the tots to mathematics and geography for the older
signers. In addition, the students are working to translate
Nicaraguan Sign Language onto the written page. (They use a Danish
symbolic system for transcribing signs into a written phonemic code:
there is a symbol for wrinkling one's nose, for example, and
another for clenching one's right fist.) One of the first books to
be translated is "The Story of Babar," explaining why the innocent
elephant has become a constant reference point for the children.
The school's dictionary now totals 1,600 words, and the children
have begun preparing a heavily truncated version of "Moby-Dick."
One thing that is not taught at Bluefields, however, is a more
established sign system like American Sign Language. In order to
preserve what Nicaragua's deaf have created, Kegl does not want to
encourage the adoption of other idioms ˜ even if that leaves the
students unable to communicate with other deaf communities. "We
don't want to kill indigenous language," she says.

Toward the end of my first day in school, the class is
interrupted by a troupe of clowns who for some reason have decided to test
their act on the deaf children. The students head outside to the
garden to watch. The clowns then put on a show of Fellini-esque
ineptitude, dropping their bowling pins and failing to turn their
somersaults. Finally one of them gets it right, and I decide it
is time for applause. I begin clapping furiously. There is utter
silence. A little put out, I turn to see the entire class raising
their hands above their heads and wiggling their fingers with
deadpan expressions.

Impressed by this silent form of applause, I decide that from
now on I will do the same, and so I raise my hands, wriggling my
fingers. The class laughs and all simultaneously put their fingers
to their chins. Dimple is catching on.

The sign languages of deaf children have been of central
interest to linguists for a quarter century. Underlying this interest is
a quest to find a linguistic "bioprogram": that is, an innate
human ability to generate all the fundamental characteristics of
language, from word creation to grammar ˜ without the help of
auditory or vocal cues.

Like kids everywhere, the ones at Bluefields know how to yuk it
up. Here, they give the photographer a round of silent applause
by wiggling their fingers.

In 1978, Heidi Feldman, Susan Goldin-Meadow and Lila Gleitman
published a seminal paper on the linguistic propensities of deaf
children, based on a group of Philadelphia kids who used simple
home signs to communicate with their hearing parents. The
researchers found that a deaf child making crude home signs would, in time,
begin bending them into languagelike patterns without knowing
what he was doing and without being taught. The mothers of these
home signers, the scholars revealed, knew far fewer signs than the
children themselves. (As trained linguists, they were able to
determine the full extent of the children's vocabularies.) And while
the parents used the home signs erratically, the deaf children
deployed their home signs in a more consistent order.

"Even deaf children grammaticize, regularize ˜ yet they can't
have learned it anywhere," Lila Gleitman says. She sees the
Nicaraguan case as buttressing her own work. "In Managua, the children
formed a continuing community that allowed their nascent language
to grow in grammatical and semantic structure. It's a magnificent
example of a whole language emerging with incredible richness."

Yet for all its triumphs, the scholarship on Nicaraguan Sign
Language makes clear that a precise line between nature and nurture
is difficult to establish. Language is the product of a shadowy
collusion between biological predisposition and social stimuli.
The bioprogram, in other words, is triggered into action by a
language community. "It would be hard to find language acquisition in
a vacuum," says Gleitman.

Jill Morford, a linguist at the University of New Mexico in
Albuquerque, argues that home signers are stuck in a limbo between
gesture and language. "Home signing," she says, "is cognitively
similar to language, but it doesn't have a grammar as such. It's in
between. The beauty of the Nicaraguan children is that they show
dramatically how we need both sides of the coin, the social and
the innate working together."

To see the limitations of home signing for myself, I take a trip
with James Shepard-Kegl by motorboat to the Pearl Lagoon, one
hour north of Bluefields. There, a few deaf children still live in
almost total isolation deep in the forests. If Bluefields seems
remote, then the Pearl Lagoon resembles another planet. Dreamy
estuaries snake through bromeliad-sprinkled rain forest that is
almost empty except for a handful of farmers living in tiny
settlements connected only by river.

Many of the children's signs are perceptive. The one for Daniel
Ortega, Nicaragua's former President, is one hand tapping the
opposing wrist ˜ to signify Ortega's flashy Rolex watch.

In a hamlet called Haulover, where huts are ringed with paths of
oyster shells, I meet a 10-year-old deaf boy named Winston. He
has never been to school. A kind of Pearl Lagoon Huck Finn, he's
about as isolated a home signer as you could possibly hope to find
anywhere. He spends all his days fishing with his homemade lines
and has a small if appropriate repertory of fishing signs.
Excited to have visitors from the big city of Bluefields, he shows us
some pigeons he shot with his sling. As we sit in rocking chairs
on the porch, his mother tells us that she and Winston can "talk
just fine." Winston goes into long bouts of head-rocking laughter
and shows us his limited stock of signs. It is clear that he
communicates with his family on some level, but there is no rhythm,
no fluidity, to his speech.

"Did you catch fish?" I ask. His mother translates.

"Catch," he signs back.

"How?"

He makes a whacking gesture.

Winston cannot express things like "today" or "later," and he
rarely if ever puts three signs together to make something that one
could call a sentence. Whereas Bluefields children somersault
through complex sentences, Winston lumbers along slowly, one sign
at a time.

As he walks Shepard-Kegl and me back to the jetties of Pearl
Lagoon, Winston shows me a few signs. "Tree." "River." "House." His
hand motions are slow, and there is a curious monotony in his
expression that somehow belies his exuberance.

I take his picture, and he shows me his fishing line and his
knife. "Big," he adds. "Tasty. Catch. Eat."

"It's sad," says Shepard-Kegl as we walk away. "But Winston's
family doesn't want him to come to the school, and so he'll remain
at this level all his life. He'll never develop a real language."

In the terrace of the Tia Irene, a waterfront hotel in
Bluefields, I sit with 20-year-old Anselmo Aleman playing chess while rain
pounds on the thatched roof. The lagoon is shadowed; the rusted
fishing boats rock violently in the downpour. We are eating a
plate of pale purple star apples. The slender Aleman is a charming
chess companion, apart from being impossible to beat. Like
Winston, he grew up in the deep rain forest, but unlike him, Aleman came
to Bluefields.

Suddenly moving his bishop into check-mate position, he smiles.
"It's like war," he signs. "You must concentrate or you lose."

Aleman learned Nicaraguan Sign Language at 15, a relatively late
age. Intelligence and hard work, however, have enabled him to
master the idiom with almost total fluency. "I couldn't learn the
language earlier," he signs, "because I grew up in the forest. It
was during the war, too, and since my father was a contra, we
were always hiding, being hunted down by Sandinistas. So I remember
guns, fear, hiding. When I came to Bluefields I was amazed. I was
like" ˜ he pauses for a moment ˜ Babar in the big city going in
the elevator for the first time."

Aleman tells me a long, complicated story about his being hit by
a firetruck when he was little, sprinkling his account with
small scenes and characters. "I can remember my childhood," he signs,
"but I can also remember not having any way to communicate.
Then, my mind was just a blank." He makes a poignant sign for this
emptiness, the palm wiping his forehead to suggest someone erasing
a blackboard.

But Aleman will never return to the blank slate. He stands at
the center of a young, dynamically evolving language that is now
devolving into dialects and variations. Like all living languages,
Nicaraguan Sign Language is plastic, mercenary and gleefully
derivative ˜ picking up idioms, slang and even basic nouns wherever
it fancies. There is even a "street" dialect that diverges in
sometimes salacious ways from the official version sanctioned by the
Nicaraguan National Association of the Deaf.

The precise intellectual import of Nicaraguan Sign Language is
still being hammered out by linguists. Noam Chomsky, who calls
what has happened in Nicaragua "a remarkable natural experiment,"
has for decades propounded the theory that there is a "biology of
grammar" embedded in our brains. (It is no accident, he has
argued, that every language from English to Zulu has subjects and
verbs.) But he is wary of saying that Kegl's research settles the
issue. "These children may have shown us something remarkable, if
indeed they came up with this language with little or no input from
outside," he says. "If that's the case, it's a very intriguing
situation indeed."

But the meditations of world-famous linguists do not mean much
to Aleman as we stroll down to the Parque Reyes. As we sit under
the coconut palms amid rusting pieces of farm machinery,
decorative rubber tires and a dilapidated bust of the Nicaraguan poet
Ruben Dario, the park seems to be at the end of the world. Seeing us
signing together, a group of Miskito Indian women stare at us in
amazement and are soon joined by the local sorbet vendor.

"I can't imagine," Aleman signs, genuinely mystified, "why you
came all this way to hear us talk. It's just our language. What's
the big deal?"

I tell him that many people are curious to know how a few deaf
children invented the world's youngest language.

"I never thought of it that way," he signs.

"It's a pretty language, too," I try to sign back. I hold both
palms toward my chest, moving my hands up and down to signify
"sign language." Then I join the index finger and thumb of my right
hand to make an oval ˜ almost like the American sign for "O.K." ˜
and glide it away from my chest to say "pretty."

"Is it?" Aleman replies. Then he beams with an undisguised
pleasure. "Yes," he says, "I suppose it is."