Intro

Language is impossibly complicated. And yet, nearly everyone uses it with ease. Where does it come from? 

In this episode we look for clues to answer this question in the story of the world’s newest language, how it arose, and what it tells us about what it means to be human. 

I’m Ben Lord. You’re listening to “I Heart This.” 

Setting the Stage

In 1979, Nicaragua was one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere … and the people of Nicaragua were some of the least educated. Children in first grade in Nicaraguan schools had about a one in five chance of getting to the sixth grade. Three quarters of the population were illiterate. 

Inciting Incident

The new Sandinista government, anxious to show that it could improve the lives of the Nicaraguan people, set out to reform the country’s education system in a National Literacy Crusade. And as part of that reform, they established a special education center in the capital city of Managua. And as part of that center, it founded several schools for deaf children–the first serious, large-scale attempt to do so in the country’s history. 

At the time, deafness was widely misunderstood. Rather than diagnosing deafness as a condition related to hearing, most Nicaraguans, it seems, focused on the deaf’s inability to speak. And deafness was often wrongly correlated with cognitive impairment. The birth of a deaf child was widely viewed as a punishment from God, divine retribution for a family’s sins. Even if they were treated with loving care by their families, deaf children had no way to communicate with the people around them. There was no sign language in Nicaragua but for whatever gestures might be used between family members. The deaf most often lived lives of isolation–stigmatized, incurable, entirely dependent on their families. 

When the new government established the first schools for the deaf, they were investing in some of the most marginalized people in one of the most marginalized countries in the world. 

Oralism

The goal of this schooling was the cultivation of productive members of Nicaragua’s workforce. So these schools provided vocational training, which was fairly successful, and language training, which wasn’t. Under the leadership of a Russian consultant, Natalia Popova, (no relation to the celebrated figure skater), these schools embraced a philosophy of oralism. Instead of teaching a sign language, which would only allow students to communicate with each other, the school committed to teaching students to use Spanish, both by speaking and by reading lips so that they could communicate with society at large. Other than rudimentary finger-spelling, gesture was discouraged in class. This spoken language training was a dismal failure, with vanishingly few students coming to any facility of Spanish. 

But even if it had succeeded, it is doubtful that the larger goal of assimilation would have followed. As the mother of one of the deaf students related, she once heard her daughter speaking in the other room and went to investigate, only to find her daughter talking to herself in the mirror. When the mother asked what she was doing, the daughter replied that this was all she could do to practice. With her thickly accented Spanish, no one else would speak with her. 

One would be forgiven for thinking that these schools were an utter waste. Whatever job skills they might have gained, students were as linguistically isolated from Nicaraguan culture as they had ever been. Often, not even their teachers could speak to or understand them. And yet, totally unintentionally, these schools created something that would not only empower their students … but also change the way the entire world understood language.  

The Miracle

In the summer of 1986, an American linguist named Judy Kegl, got a call from the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education. Something strange was happening at the schools of the deaf, something the Ministry and the teachers at the school didn’t understand, and they needed help figuring out what to do. 

Judy agreed, and what she observed in the schoolyard in Managua would astound everyone. All around her kids were communicating by sign. This was not something they’d learned in the classrooms … not anything that they had learned at home. When these schools had started, not even a decade ago, there had been no sign language of any kind in all of Nicaragua. And although it was composed of signs that Judy had never seen before, it didn’t take long for her to understand that this wasn’t just some amalgam of disparate signals. These kids, behind the backs of their teachers, had invented a new language–seemingly from thin air. 

Exposition

To truly appreciate the awesomeness of this, take a moment to ponder just how fantastically complicated language is. To someone who has used language as long as they can remember, its complexity often becomes invisible.

Linguists typically divide the study of language into several components, each of which is dizzying on its own. 

First are the basic building blocks, the sounds or gestures that make up a language. In English, for example, some sounds (like /p/, /b/, and /m/) are part of our language, others (like whistle or click or raspberry) are not. The allowable sounds or gestures are different in each language. In English we don’t use the sound /r/, but French does. San languages use several kinds of clicks. We have to learn which sounds are language sounds and which are not. But sounds don’t actually occur in discreet units, so we don’t actually learn to recognize individual sounds so much as we learn the range of those sounds that count as a particular unit or phoneme. Sometimes those ranges can be quite wide. In Hawaiian the /w/ and /v/ sounds are interchangeable. In others, they’re quite narrow. A novice in French (like me) might ask the waiter for vent, hoping to get some wine, when I’ve actually (and confusingly for the waiter) asking for wind. The difference between vent and vin might take some practice, but sometimes the sound differentiations made so easily by native speakers seem nearly impossible to non-native ones. It is easy for a native English speaker to hear and to produce the differences between /l/ and /r/, but if your first language is Japanese (which only has a similar sound right in the middle between /l/ and /r/), it takes a great deal of practice to learn them. Then, even when you do, you need to remember which one to use in every … single … word. This reveals the trouble with not just learning to distinguish the sounds you hear, but also to move your mouth and tongue and lips in just the right way to recreate them. And that is just the first layer of complexity. 

Next, you have to learn how to arrange whatever sounds are in your toolkit into workable, syllables and words. In any given language, not all sounds can go together. Think of a word spelled LPDA, which can’t be pronounced in English. It’s a non-word. Then compare that to DALP /dalp/ which can be pronounced just fine. Dalp isn’t a non-word, it’s just a nonsense word. In language, a small number of possible sounds, can become a staggering number of pronounceable syllables. No language has just 10 consonants and 10 vowels. All of them have more. But even a language with such a tiny number of sounds and limited itself to only arranging them in a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern in each syllable … Even that simplest language … would have a trillion possible four syllable words. Only a tiny fraction of these would ever be used as true words, allowing for a nearly limitless store of new words to be coined. The words “blog” and “COVID,” for example, were meaningless nonsense words when I was a child, but now, they’re words I’ll bet you’ve used. 

This is where language-learning starts to get really hard. People who study language-learning estimate that a novice in a language typically needs about 3,000 word and their variations just to get by. This is the biggest obstacle to learning an additional language–the raw scale of it. But 3,000 is just the tip of the iceberg. Most native speakers have command of about 20,000 word families. And a robust education can easily double that number. Most school aged children learn an average of 10 new words a day. And learning a word isn’t just about learning a combination of sounds. We have to build what each individual word means. When I say “dog,” and you picture something in your mind, it might be completely different than the “dog” I see in mine. Dog is a wide-ranging idea that can encompass a poodle, a great dane, and a chihuahua. What a miracle that you and I can see a breed that we’ve never seen before and both instantly recognize it as a dog. And yet, if I say, “It’s been a long day, I’ve got to rest my dogs.” You know I’m not talking about chinhuahaus. And you know that if I used the word “dog” to talk about another person, it would be terribly offensive, even when we talk about our pets with utmost affection. Each word is kind of its own universe. 

But words alone do not a language make. I could say, “The dog chased the cat.” and you would know what I meant, but If I said “The chased cat dog the.” It would mean nothing. Words only have meaning in certain orders and structure, and each language has its own rules. This is the layer of syntax and grammar. And while we spend time trying to articulate the rules of grammar in school. We don’t actually learn syntax there, (at least not in our native languages). Instead, we just learn to recognize, understand, and write the patterns we already know. It delights and amazes me how we learn these rules and yet they remain invisible to us. We learn them without ever learning them. Why is “Akbar bathed himself.” meaningful when “himself bathed Akbar.” isn’t? Why does “a big red balloon” sound fine to me when “a red big balloon” sounds weird.    

But we’re still not done! Even meaningful words in a grammatical order can be meaningless. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” On their own each of these words means something, just not together in this way. And then there’s the context. If Judy walks into John’s apartment and says, “I’m leaving.” and John answers, “Who is he?” In most situations, this would make no sense at all. What does “Who is he?” have to do with “I’m leaving.” But if you’re like me, your brain automatically fills in the context with a story about how John and Judy are romantically involved and Judy has found another lover. “I’m leaving.” “Who is he?” 

And we haven’t even scratched the surface of intonation, idiom, innuendo, or writing. We cannot even begin to wrap our heads around it all, and yet we do all of this, all of this … in an instant. Language is like breathing, right on the boundary of our conscious and unconscious worlds. Just as I can take a deep breath, I can also choose my words carefully. And yet most of the time, I don’t. I hardly ever think about which words will come next or which order I will put them in … any more than I think about breathing. 

This miraculous superpower of ours is so improbable that understanding its evolution and origins has been called the “hardest problem in science.” How can something so impossible to understand be so easy to do? How could schoolchildren invent something like that out of thin air? 

Back to the Miracle

When Judy Kegl saw the kids signing in the schoolyard, they were using verb tenses and verb agreement and pronoun references in first, second, and third person. This new Nicaraguan Sign Language was unlike American Sign Language or any other. In all the world, there was nothing quite like it. In 1980, it didn’t exist. In 1986, it did. In 2025, there are more than 1500 speakers. 

What happened? How did it start? It is likely that we will never know the full story. But we do know this. When the government had created these schools, they had inadvertently created a community. They had brought together a group of people with hopes and loves and traumas and desires. They had brought people with something to say together with people to say it to. And so they did. 

While these children were discouraged from signing in school itself, they were with each other at meals, at recess, and on the buses. The idiosyncratic gestures they had used with their families were probably the starting point. That, and a desire to connect, to have someone else in the world know what you think and what you feel. 

None of us are born knowing Korean or Swahili. Language isn’t instinctual like laughter or tears. But clearly, something in our brains is primed for language. And just as clearly, it is not something that we can unlock on our own. Language only arises when, like the deaf children brought out of isolation and into the Nicaraguan schools, we have someone to share it with. 

And I think this is true not just for language. We contain, within ourselves, the seeds of beautiful things … seeds that only grow in the supportive presence of others. In order to realize our talents … indeed, in order to become ourselves … we need other people to do it. We evolved to be together. There is no spontaneous language. There is no self-made man. We all make each other. Together. 

Outro

Hey, everyone. I’m looking for feedback and would really like to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on “I Heart This?” Should we do more interviews? More “on the street” episodes? Do you know of inspiring or insightful stories we should tell or people we should talk to? How would you feel about guest essayists or hearing other voices on the show? Tell me what you’d like to see by emailing ben@iheartthispodcast.com or leaving a message on our I Heart This Podcast Facebook page. 

And thanks to everyone who has been spreading the word. I Heart this has doubled its listenership since the beginning of 2025 and that it is entirely thanks to people like you sharing it with other people. I am so honored to have your recommendations. 

I Heart This is written, edited, and produced by me, Ben Lord. Our logo was designed by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Our website is iheartthispodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening. And, as always, Be kind. Be curious, and be thankful.