Resilience Among Kids:

How Deaf Nicaraguan Kids Invented a New Sign Language

By Shlomo Maital

     We adults can learn a lot from children.  Especially, about resilience.  This is a story of deaf Nicaraguan kids – who came together and invented a language,  now known as Nicaraguan sign language.  It is recounted in a BBC broadcast:

    “In the 1980s deaf children in Nicaragua invented a completely new sign language of their own. This remarkable achievement allowed experts a unique insight into how human communication develops.  

    “US linguist Judy Shepard-Kegl documented the emergence of what is now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language. Teachers were brought from Europe who tried to teach Spanish using fingerspelling, which the children couldn’t grasp because they’d never learned Spanish. But they all had their own signs that they used at home. And in the classroom, the playground and the school bus, they began to share them, eventually turning impromptu communication into a common language.  

     “Until the 1970s, there were no facilities or learning programs for deaf children in Nicaragua, but with the Sandinista revolution came a new impetus to provide education for kids with special needs. Four hundred deaf children were identified in Managua, and two schools created for them. ISN is now an internationally recognised sign language.

     “Judy Kegl  established in 1986 that a structured language had emerged. ‘A language has been born before our eyes,’ Steven Pinker wrote in The Language Instinct.  The first ISN dictionary was published in 1996, helping the language to become more widespread, though there isn’t the money for every deaf child to have their own copy.  And it wasn’t until 2004 that interpreters were available, though in the last few years they’ve become more numerous and are seen on TV news channels and at official occasions, notably presidential speeches.”

    The children were given visual images, cartoons, and asked to use their sign language to recount what was happening in them.  Linguists like Kegl puzzled out the grammar – which turned out to be rich and complex.  Deaf kids at home during the brutal Somosa dictatorship used gestures, and their parents understood.

       But when they came together in large groups, the language emerged, because both the need and the value of communicating were born.  And the resilient kids responded.