Deaf kids in 1980s Nicaragua created a language from thin air

Yesterday, Boing Boing reported on a remarkable moment in language development. Nicaragua's first deaf education center opened in Managua in nineteen seventy-seven with just fifty students. Within six years, enrollment had surged to four hundred across two locations. Frustrated teachers attempted to instruct the students in Spanish and lipreading—conventional approaches that mostly failed. Without formal instruction to build on, the children did something extraordinary: they invented a completely new language, demonstrating how communication naturally emerges when traditional methods cannot succeed.

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