Nicaraguan Sign Language

[3] The conditions necessary for a language to arise occurred in 1977 when a center for special education established a scheme that was initially attended by 50 deaf children.

The number of pupils at the school (in the Managua neighborhood of San Judas) then grew to 100 by 1979, the beginning of the Sandinista Revolution.

The children subsequently remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers, but the schoolyard, the street, and the school bus provided fertile ground for them to communicate with one another.

Staff at the school, unaware of the development of this new language, saw the children's gesturing as mime and a failure to acquire Spanish.

In June 1986, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education contacted Judy Kegl, an American Sign Language linguist from MIT.

[4] Critics argued a form of linguistic imperialism had been occurring internationally for decades, in which individuals would introduce ASL to populations of deaf people in other countries, often supplanting existing local sign languages.

In contrast, ISN was developed by a group of young people with only non-conventional home sign systems and gestures.

They found that this movement from the neutral space was much more common among signers who began learning at a younger age than their peers who did so when they were older.

Points can serve a "pronoun-like function, coordinating with the spatial modulations to verbs, to indicate the argument structure of the sentence, and to co-index referents across discourse".

[12] Senghas and Coppola have noted that signers who learned ISN before the Extensive Contact Period (before 1983) were inconsistent in whether an event was represented as rotated or reflected (unrotated) in the signing space.

Senghas and Coppola suggested that this meant that "spatial modulations are being used as a shared grammatical element among this age cohort".

[14] There is so far no final evidence available to resolve the controversy surrounding nativism v. cultural learning, and the dispute reaches far into theoretical linguistics, the approaches of which may conceptualize grammar in different and incompatible ways.

Tim Ingold, a British anthropologist, discussed these matters at some length in Perception of the Environment (2000), though he does not specifically deal with ISN.