The Language Nobody Taught
by Anushka Jaiswal (India)
In the 1980s, deaf children in Nicaragua built a sign language from nothing, simply by being placed together in a classroom. Each new generation of children made the language more grammatically complex than the one before, revealing something about how human minds handle language. This piece traces that story and what it proves about how grammar is built, not taught.
In a schoolyard in Managua, deaf children signed to each other between classes — hands moving fast, faces animated, a private language none of the adults around them understood. Judy Kegl hadn't expected to see anything like it. She'd been invited to Nicaragua by a group called Linguists for Nicaragua, which included Noam Chomsky, who is known for revolutionizing linguistics with his theory of generative grammar, after the country's Ministry of Education asked for someone who specialized in deafness. Kegl assumed the trip would be like every other programme: six weeks, an existing deaf community, teachers who needed help understanding a sign language already in place. Instead, there was no existing language to interpret. She was seeing a language being born, live, by deaf kids.
Before Kegl arrived, deaf children in Nicaragua grew up mostly alone, in the sense that mattered most for language. There was no deaf community they could turn to, no shared sign system passed down to them. Most of them grew up using small sets of gestures made up just for their own families, which meant a deaf child in one town might not be able to communicate at all with a deaf child in another. That changed when Nicaragua opened its first schools built specifically for deaf students. Suddenly, for the first time, dozens of deaf children were placed in the same classrooms and hallways every day. None of them, and none of their teachers, had a common language to use. But just being together, every day, turned out to be enough. With nothing existing to copy, the children started building their own way to communicate, piece by piece. At first it was simple: signs strung together in a strict pattern, almost always nouns followed by verbs, closer to basic gestures than to a real language with grammar. What matters most here is who did the building. The children who arrived at the school first were the ones inventing this early, simple version. The children who came later did not invent anything themselves. They simply grew up inside a language that already existed, and what they did with it next is where this story gets interesting.
The first cohort of children, arriving between the late 1970s and early 1980s, had nothing to build from, so they started small. They used simple hand movements and gestures, limited to a certain space right in front of their chest, mostly pointing at things and acting them out. If a man tapped a woman, a child from this cohort would sign it as "man tap woman," small gestures kept close to the body, one after another. There were no complex sentences, no real grammar yet. But this planted the seed, the basics of communication that everything else would grow from.
The second cohort, joining in the mid-1980s, was raised alongside the first cohort, and together they made changes that turned the language into something far more systematic. Signs were no longer limited to the space near the chest. They spread out in every direction, left, right, up, down. This is where grammar started to appear. Space itself began to show who did what to whom. Take the same sentence, a man tapping a woman. A child from this cohort would point to one spot in space, off to the left, to stand for "man," and another spot to the right for "woman." Then, instead of signing "tap" on its own, they would move the sign for tap from the left spot to the right spot, showing the action travel from one person to the other. Pointing had stopped being simple pointing. It had become verb agreement and pronouns, doing the same job those tools do in English.
By the time the third cohort came through, between the late 1980s and the 1990s, the language was already rich, and these children pushed it even further. They used the full space around them and began folding in facial expressions and body movement as part of the grammar itself, not just as decoration. This let them express abstract ideas the earlier cohorts couldn't, things like respect and obligation. Picture two women, one in a black shirt, one in green. A signer from this cohort would first establish each woman's position in space, indexing the woman in black to the left and the woman in green to the right. Then they would sign the action itself, a push, moving it from the black woman's position to the green woman's position, so the direction of the sentence showed exactly who pushed whom. Finally, they would add one more sign at the end, for respect, linked to the same spatial positions, to show that the woman in green was asking the woman in black for respect. All of that — who did what, to whom, and what social meaning it carried — packed into a single sentence, without repeating a single noun. This is the point where Nicaraguan Sign Language stopped being simple communication and became a full language, with grammar, rules, and the ability to say anything.
Someone reading this could reasonably push back and say this isn't really about grammar being wired into the brain at all; maybe it just shows that children pick up new skills faster than adults in general, and grammar happened to be one of those skills. It is true that children learn most things faster than grown-ups do. But Senghas and Coppola tested this exact question directly. In their 2001 study, they looked specifically at whether the growing complexity in Nicaraguan Sign Language was coming from adults refining the language, or from children building it themselves. Their results showed the changes came from children, and specifically from children aged ten and younger. That rules out the simplest counterargument. If this were just a story about kids learning faster in general, you would expect improvement to show up gradually across all ages. Instead, the grammar sharpened specifically in the youngest signers, the ones whose brains were still in that early window of development, which is exactly what you would expect if something more specific than general learning speed was going on.
What happened in that Managua schoolyard was never really about deafness, or even about sign language specifically. It is a window into how a child's mind works when it is given the barest raw material and the need to use it. Nobody handed these children a language. They built one because they needed to be understood, and because the drive to connect, to tell each other things, to belong to each other, turned out to be stronger than the silence they started with. The first cohort only had to strike the first spark. Everything that followed, the grammar, the space, the ability to speak of respect and obligation, grew from children simply being children, doing what children have always done with the tools they are given. This is also why the timing mattered so much. A deaf child who grows up without this kind of early exposure does not just struggle to communicate later; they can grow up believing something is wrong with them, that their own thoughts are too complicated for anyone, even their own parents, to understand. Nicaraguan Sign Language proves that was never true. Given the chance, and given it early enough, a child's mind will build a language on its own, rich enough to say anything at all.
Resources:
https://linguistics.princeton.edu/news/2017/jennie-yang-20-interviews-judy-kegl-about-birth-language-nicaragua
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTPGmKoDk0Y (Ann Senghas, CARTA talk) Senghas, A., & Coppola, M. (2001). Children Creating Language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar. Psychological Science, 12, 323-328.
