Sign Language Isolates
There is direct evidence that a large number of sign languages have arisen independently, without any ancestral language, and thus are true language isolates. The most famous of these is the Nicaraguan Sign Language, a well documented case of what has happened in schools for the deaf in many countries. In Tanzania, for example, there are seven schools for the deaf, and seven sign languages, none with any known connection to anything else in the world. The disregard shown to such languages, which students may be punished for using and which schools may deny even exist, makes it difficult to list sign language isolates the way oral language isolates are listed in the tables below.
Sign languages have also developed outside schools, in communities with high incidences of deafness. Such languages include Kata Kolok in Bali, the Adamorobe Sign Language in Ghana, the Urubú Sign Language in Brazil, several Mayan sign languages, and half a dozen sign languages of the hill tribes in Thailand, such as the Ban Khor Sign Language.
These and more are all presumed isolates or small local families, because many deaf communities are made up of people who do not have sign language–speaking parents, and have manifestly, as shown by the language itself, not borrowed their sign language from other deaf communities during the often recorded history of these languages.
Read more about this topic: Language Isolate
Famous quotes containing the words sign, language and/or isolates:
“The man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone,—good-by,—fare-well. But the Landlord can afford to live without privacy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When a language creates—as it does—a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.”
—Christopher Ricks (b. 1933)
“In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)