The decades-long battle over deaf communication in Nicaragua

The world’s only living natural experiment in the creation of language has happened among the deaf in Nicaragua when oralism was replaced by what is now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language—and at the same time ASL was rejected. As Dan Rosenheck discovered, it has fundamentally changed how linguists think about one of civilisation’s greatest mysteries. Read more in an in-depth article from 1843 magazine here.