Sandinista Revolution: The Nicaraguan Sign Language

Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the newly installed Nicaraguan Government inaugurated the country's first large-scale effort to educate deaf children. The students were enrolled in two Managua schools and arrived with only a limited crude gestural signs, which had been developed within their families. As the children were brought together they begin to sign amongst themselves, therefore creating a new language. A decade later, Nicaraguan Sign
Language, came from the creation of the children.
Attempts to teach finger spelling were a failure because the children had no prior of words, let alone letters. Due to this, the children were barely able to communicate with their teachers, but were able to easily communicate amongst each other. The younger children signed with a rhythm and …show more content…
The ways in which they communicate with others is more broad level, and they are able to communicate more easily with others. With home signing there are limitations, because only a small amount of gestures have been learned within families, in order to communicate. This limited amount communication makes it more difficult to communicate with others outside of the family.
Sign language in this case is similar to that of ape signing language projects, in that both cases teachers came in and tried to teach a specific kind of sign language to each. Also in each scenario, both the children and the apes were able to pick up a certain amount from what they were taught. How each differs, is that the apes were only able to go off of what they were taught, whereas the children learned and created a language, pretty much all on their own amongst each other. The children were also able to expand and broaden their communication, as they learned more and grew. In ape projects, the ways in which apes communicated did not go further than a certain amount of what they had been