Giving Birth to a New Language In 1977, a special school for deaf children opened in Managua, Nicaragua. The children quickly developed a system of gestures for communicating with one another. Since then, the system of gestures has evolved into a unique new language with its own grammar and syntax—Idioma de Signos Nicaragense (Senghas & others, 2004; Siegal, 2004). The birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language is not a unique event. Linguists Wendy Sandler and her colleagues (2005) at the University of Haifa have documented the spontaneous development of another unique sign language, this one in a remote Bedouin village where a large number of villagers share a form of hereditary deafness (Fox, 2008). Like Nicaraguan Sign Language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language has its own syntax and grammatical rules, which differ from other languages in the region. The spontaneous evolution of these two unique sign languages vividly demonstrates the human predisposition to develop rule-based systems of communication (Meir & others, 2010).

Sign Language Research Lab, University of Haifa.