Editing Nicaraguan Sign Language (section)

==Academic interpretation==
=== When it became language ===
Researchers disagree regarding at what stage in the development of ISN it became a full-fledged language.

* Coppola argues that isolated family-signed systems in Nicaragua contained components that can be called linguistic (but that does not mean she equates home sign with language). 
* Kegl argues that following an intermediate stage when deaf contact gesturers came together and developed a communication sufficient to make young children think their input was a language to be acquired, the first generation of young children acquired a language as complete and rich as any human language known to date; subsequent changes constitute an expected process of historical change. 
* Senghas argues that once ISN came into being, it became more and more complex over successive cohorts of young acquirers.

=== Evidence for innate language capacities ===
[[William Stokoe]], known by many as the father of American Sign Language linguistics, disagreed that the emergence of ISN is evidence of a [[language acquisition device]]. Stokoe also questions assertions that the language has emerged entirely without outside influence from, for example, Spanish or ASL.<ref>{{cite web |last= Stokoe |first= William |title= Letter to the Editor, Magazine |url= http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/Stokoeletter.html |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20151222134728/http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/Stokoeletter.html |archive-date= Dec 22, 2015}}</ref> There is so far no final evidence available to resolve the controversy surrounding nativism v. cultural learning, and the dispute reaches far into theoretical linguistics, the approaches of which may conceptualize grammar in different and incompatible ways. Even if the evidence collected seems to indicate a lack of access to Spanish and ASL in the early emergence process, the possibility remains that the development of ISN is facilitated by the speaker's exposure to more general communicative strategies in early infancy.

Alternatives to theories proposing a language acquisition device have been presented by [[Michael Tomasello]] (among others).{{Citation needed|date=April 2012}} Tomasello argues that the process of acquiring a first language is boosted by non-linguistic communication, as in the establishment of joint intentional frames and in the understanding of communicative intentions.<ref>{{cite book |last=Tomasello |first=Michael |author-link=Michael Tomasello |year=2014 |title=A Natural History of Human Thinking |publisher=MIT Press}}</ref>

In any case, once ISN came into being, like other languages, it actively engaged in contact with languages in its environment.

=== As "unwritable" ===
R. J. Senghas (1997) used the phrase "unspeakable, unwritable" language in the title of his dissertation to highlight the common misconception that those languages without a written form are not as "real" (a view often held by those who do not study indigenous languages).{{sfn|Senghas|1997}} In a similar fashion, sign languages are often not given proper recognition because they are not spoken or written. (Senghas has never claimed that Nicaraguan Sign Language is unwritable, just that it was often thought of as such by those who do not study sign languages.)

Generally, the influence literacy has on the status of a language is also addressed in debates on the so-called "written language paradigm" in which it is acknowledged that the availability of written language to some extent must be considered as a culturally and historically dependent phenomenon. [[Tim Ingold]], a British anthropologist, discussed these matters at some length in ''Perception of the Environment'' (2000), though he does not specifically deal with ISN.

Since 1996, however, Nicaraguans have been writing their language by hand and on a computer using [[SignWriting]].<!--removed link to signwriting.org, it does not verify the claim--> There are now many texts written in Nicaraguan Sign Language, including three volumes of reading lessons in ISN, Spanish I and II (two levels of texts, workbooks, and primers), {{lang|es|Cuentos Españoles}} (a collection of stories in Spanish with ISN glossaries), and a geography text.