 their own language
Before 1977, deaf children in Nicaragua lived with their families and were often very isolated, as there were no special schools for them. Generally, they created their own gestures for communicating with their families. But by 1983, more than 400 of them were attending a school in the capital city. The students there really wanted to speak to each other, but did not have a common language.
They started to create one together, transforming their separate home signing systems into the beginnings of a new language. Younger children learned from older children, and changed the hand gestures to make them more fluent.
So before spoken language might have got started, just like before LSN got started, we probably communicated in a proto-language with a small range of sounds and signs local to our own group.
Photo by Andrea Tummons on Unsplash, CC BY
Through repeated interaction inside our small community groups and between those groups over thousands of years, better ways of communicating with sound arose, either by chance or by people being creative.
We know from experiments (like this one) that people like to adopt new ways of representing things if they seem better, or more efficient.
Over many thousands of years, there would have been lots of opportunities to create new ways of talking, try them out, adapt them, keep the good ones, and steal better ones from your neighbours.
In the space of a few short years, deaf Nicaraguan school children created their own language. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the same process created the thousands of spoken languages that exist in the world today.
Read more: Curious Kids: Who made the alphabet song?
Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to email@example.com
Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.
– ref. Curious Kids: how did spoken language start? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-did-spoken-language-start-109190