Nicaraguan Sign Language

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Linguistics; Nicaraguan Sign Language...

The next requested topic was proposed by lyonnesse, who wrote:
"i'd like to hear your thoughts and feelings about... the origin of
nicaraguan sign."

The history of the origin of Nicaraguan Sign Language (which is called
ISN, for Idioma de Signos Nicaragense -- not NSL) is a matter of record,
and so far as I know there's no controversy about that history. Nicaragua
had had no sign language, and no official program of any kind for the
education of deaf children, until -- after the Sandinista revolution in
1979 -- two schools specifically for deaf children were established in
Managua, and hundreds of students, none of whom knew any of the world's
sign languages, were enrolled there. Where the children proceeded to
develop ISN from scratch, in three stages: first pantomime; then a pidgin;
and finally an actual sign language. They have also begun using Sign
Writing [see http:www.signwriting.org ] to create an ISN literature. [For
a detailed account and discussion, see "A Linguistic Big Bang," by
Lawrence Osborne, at
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910d&L=ads-1&P=1101 .]

Two things about this history made it a major event in linguistics. First,
the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education brought in an American sign-language
specialist -- Judy Kegl -- to observe and report on what was happening.
Second, as Susan Goldin-Meadow writes: "It is relatively easy to use the
manual modality to invent representational forms that can be immediately
understood by naive observers (e.g., indexical pointing gestures or iconic
miming gestures). As a result, communication systems can be invented on
the spot in the manual modality, which means that sign systems have the
potential to provide a window onto the process of language creation." [In
"Watching language grow," at
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=549019 .] Steven
Pinker's take on this goes: "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." [Quoted in Wikipedia's article, "Nicaraguan Sign Language," at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language .]

There are two major controversies about all this, however -- one
linguistic-theory controversy, and one ethical controversy. The ethical
one is discussed in the Wikipedia article under the heading "Linguistic
imperialism," as follows: "From the beginning of her research in Nicaragua
in 1986 until Nicaraguan Sign Language was well-established, Kegl
carefully avoided introducing the signed languages she already knew, in
particular American Sign Language, to the Deaf community in Nicaragua. A
type of linguistic imperialism had been occurring internationally for
decades where individuals would introduce ASL to populations of Deaf
people in other countries, often supplanting already existing local signed
languages. Kegl's policy was to document and study rather than to impose
or change the language or its community."

There have been objections to this policy from other scholars, who feel
that it isolates the Nicaraguan signers from the world's Deaf communities.
The linguistic-theory controversy is about what the ISN phenomenon tells
us about language acquisition and the human brain. On one side we have the
orthodox Chomskian ("innateness") position, which claims -- very roughly
speaking -- that human infants are "hard-wired" for the learning of human
languages. There are scientists who insist that ISN proves that claim. And
then there are the opposing positions, which propose (in more than one
version) that "nurture" is as important as (or more important than)
"nature" for the language acquisition process. For an article taking that
side, see for example William C. Stokoe's "Models, Signs, and Universal
Rules," at
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/sign_language_studies/v001/1.1stokoe.html .
Stokoe invokes Occam's Razor and claims that ISN can be explained without
any need for resorting to claims about hard-wiring.

Finally, there's a related, but less heated, controversy about whether the
characteristics of ISN are also evidence for various proposed features of
a hypothetical "universal grammar" of human languages.

http://ozarque.livejournal.com/369548.html

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