The development of language
Those interested in the study and emergence of languages should do some reading about a remarkable series of occurrences in Nicaragua during the 1970s. Students at a number of schools for the deaf there, initially staffed by teachers who did not know sign language, invented their own version, which grew in complexity over a period of years.
Ann Senghas, of Columbia University, has studied the signing capabilities of people who left the school at differing times and therefore different stages of the evolution of this language. Users of the early versions of the language, for instance, could not describe whether something was on the left or right side of a photograph; users of later versions could do so.
Perhaps the most interesting questions raised by this situation relate to the nature of human cognition where it comes to language. For instance, it makes one wonder about the degree to which people are instinctually provided with mechanisms for both the comprehension and development of language.
More information is in this Wikipedia entry.
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I remember reading a bit of Noam Chomsky on innate language acquisition when I was an undergraduate. It was quite interesting, but I don't have time to follow up everything that's quite interesting...
You may be interested in looking up Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. Only 150 people speak it, in Israel. Unlike most sign-language, it is used between individuals who are able to hear, as well as among the deaf.
A fictional sign language employed in similar fashion is 'jive' from a number of William Gibson's books, notably: "Neuromancer."
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Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one?
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Fall/full-McWhorter-Fall-2009.html
"s 5,500 languages slowly disappear, the aesthetic loss is not to be dismissed. And in fact dying languages become museum pieces. For this reason it is fortunate and crucial that modern technology is recording and analyzing them more thoroughly than ever before. Perhaps a future lies before us in which English will be a sort of global tongue while people continue to speak about 600 other languages among themselves. English already is a de facto universal language—yet those who would consider it a blessing if everyone over 15 spoke an artificial language like Esperanto are often somewhat diss-kussted that this is the status English is moving closer toward decade by decade."
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