A Language Born in the Streets
The Remarkable Emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language

About this book:

In the dusty schoolyards of 1980s Managua, something that linguists deemed impossible unfolded: a language was born. Not evolved, not borrowed—but *created* from nothing by children who had never known a shared word. *A Language Born in the Streets* tells the astonishing true story of how Nicaragua’s deaf children, isolated for generations by dictatorship, poverty, and the dogma of oralism, were brought together by a revolution’s flawed attempt at education—and in the spaces between classrooms, on bus rides and playgrounds, forged Idioma de Señas Nicaragüense, the only language in recorded history documented from its very first gestures to full grammatical maturity.

This is a scientific detective story wrapped in human drama. You’ll meet the home-signers who arrived at San Judas carrying only private, family-bound gestures; the teachers who misunderstood the miracle unfolding before them; the linguists like Judy Kegl who raced to document a "big bang" of syntax, spatial grammar, and verb agreement emerging in real time; and the young deaf Nicaraguans who, in building a language, built a culture, a community, and a political voice. From the earthquake-rubble barrios of pre-revolutionary Nicaragua to the digital screens where ISN thrives today, the book traces how the language instinct—deprived of input but denied nothing else—rewrote the rules of what human cognition can achieve.

More than a chronicle of linguistic genesis, this is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. It challenges our deepest assumptions about language, biology, and the necessity of community. Whether you are fascinated by the architecture of the mind, the history of revolution, or the quiet revolution that occurs when marginalized people finally find one another, *A Language Born in the Streets* offers a front-row seat to one of the most extraordinary events in the history of our species.