Nicaraguan Sign Language

Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; Spanish: Idioma de SeƱas de Nicaragua) is a sign language largely spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. It is of particular interest to the linguists who study it, because it offers a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new language.

Read more about Nicaraguan Sign Language:  History, ISN and Linguistics

Famous quotes containing the words sign language, sign and/or language:

    “The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
    —Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    “He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.”
    —Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    “Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
    which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
    —Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)