Comrades of the 22nd Presidium of Quiz Bowl at NYU! The Central Committee has determined that practice will be held in the discord this Friday at 4 PM Eastern. Failure to attend will result in your expulsion from the Party and a trial by a Special Session of the Supreme Court, with a guilty verdict all but certain. By order of Comrade First Secretary Theresa Ieronimovna, all Party Members must also fill out this form in order to participate in ACF Fall, and this other form in order to participate in LIT (this second form is due before practice on Friday). Anyway, now that the official business is out of the way, let’s talk about how a new language forms.

We actually know less about this than you would think; almost all of the world’s languages are extremely old, so we don’t have any real documentation on their formation. That is why the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language (or ISN) is so fascinating. Nicaragua lacked a real deaf community until the Sandinistas ousted the Somoza dictatorship and created the first school for the deaf in Managua. The deaf children who came to learn all already had their own unique systems of home sign, each of which was a mix of gestures and more complicated signs the children had developed to communicate with their hearing families. The government attempted to teach Spanish to the children, though the attempt was a resounding failure; it’s extremely difficult to teach language to children instead of having them pick it up through organic child language acquisition. The children did end up learning language, but not in the way the government intended.

Instead, the children combined their systems of home sign into a pidgin (called LSN) that they used on the playgrounds and during breaks. As new groups of kids arrived, the older students taught those new students their pidgin, and as they did so, it developed complex systems of rules and grammar; it had undergone creolization, as generally happens to pidgins that a new generation acquires and adapts. This new creole, based on the home signs that the first waves of children had brought and then reinforced with complex grammar, is what is now ISN. Linguists were able to document pretty much the whole process in real time, giving us significant insight into the birth of a new language.

See you all at practice and the next meeting of the Presidium,

Lev Bernstein, Minister of Communications, Quiz Bowl at NYU, 22nd Presidium