victoria solomonides, friend of melina mercouri.ss history every month on the bbc news channel, or you can catch up on all ourfilms — along with more than 2,000 radio programmes — in our online archive. just go to... now, we go to the 1980s, when deaf people in nicaragua were first enrolled in schools. there, they invented a sign language which of their own. linguistjudy shepard—kegl was there to document this, providing a unique insight into our understanding of how humans communicate. my little linguist brain, looking at them signing to each other, was going, "ok. oh, this is what's happening, this is that rule, this is what's happening with the grammar," and i realised, "whoa, we are seeing the emergence of a language." this was something that needed to be documented. prior to the 1980s, deaf people were very isolated in nicaragua. all they had was a handful of gestures, something like "i want to eat" or "i feel sick" or "i have to go to the bathroom" — i mean, just gestures that were used in the family. in the early 1980s, with