In the The Economist, Feb 21, 2004, Science & Technology:

Deaf people are making a profound contribution to the study of language
Just as biologists rarely see a new species arise, linguists rarely see a new language being born. You have to be in the right place at the right time, which usually you are not. But the past few decades have seen an exception. Linguists have been able to follow the formation of a new language in Nicaragua. The catch is that it is not a spoken language but, rather, a sign language which arose spontaneously in deaf children. Ann Senghas, of Columbia University, in New York, one of the linguists who has been studying this language, told the AAAS conference in Seattle about her discoveries. And Susan Goldin-Meadow, of the University of Chicago, who studies the spontaneous emergence of signing in deaf children, filled in the background by showing how such children use hand signals in a different way from everybody else....[read rest of the story]

In Mothering, Jan-Feb, 2002:

We know children can learn language, but a new study says that they can create it, too. For a decade, psycholinguists Ann Senghas of Barnard College and Marie Coppola of the University of Rochester have been observing deaf children at the Melania Morales School for Special Education in Nicaragua actually create their own language, now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). The study is unprecedented in that no one has ever before witnessed the birth of a language....[read rest of the story]

In Bılım ve Teknık, Oct. 14, 2001:

Nikaragua hükümeti 1970’li yılların sonlarında sağırlar için bir okul açtığında öğretmenleri doğal olarak kendilerine dudak okumayı ve İspanyolca okuma ve yazmayı öğretmeye başlamışlar. Ancak bir süre sonra fark etmişler ki, çocuklar teneffüslerde, öğrendikleriyle değil, kendi geliştirdikleri bir takım kurallarla iletişim kuruyorlar....[download the pdf of the story]

In the Science, Sept. 7, 2001:

Nicaraguan deaf students have created a new sign language, and it has fueled the debate among linguists over how languages are formed
Nicaragua established a school for the deaf in the late 1970s, teachers—all of them hearing—focused on teaching the children to read lips and to read and write Spanish. But outside the classroom, the children began to communicate by their own rules. Some teachers noticed the strange new hand gestures that the children exchanged and called it “mime,” and a few adults found it useful to learn some of the gestures to communicate better with the children. But none, apparently, realized they were watching the birth of a language....[order a reprint of rest of the story]

In the New York Times, Oct. 24, 1999:

For the first time in history, scholars are witnessing the birth of a language—a complex sign system being created by deaf children in Nicaragua
Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the newly installed Nicaraguan Government inaugurated the country’s first large-scale effort to educate deaf children. Hundreds of students were enrolled in two Managua schools. Not being privy to the more than 200 existing sign languages used by hearing-impaired people around the world, Managua's deaf children started from ground zero. They had no grammar or syntax—only crude gestural signs developed within their own families. These pantomimes, which deaf kids use to communicate basic needs like “eat,” “drink” and “ice cream,” are called mimicas in Spanish....[read rest of the story]