Not much is known about the underlying processes by which a language is born. Almost all humans can communicate either by speech/sound, writing, or sign/mime. A typical language is composed of words/signs, and a grammar that binds them into a meaningful construct. However, the origins of language are lost, and we do not have much insight into how (or if) a new language would be created by a group of people who were never introduced to languages before.

ABSL signer telling a story (Courtesy: ScienceDaily.com) Linguists are gaining new insights into this process by studying a sign language (ABSL, or Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) created by group of deaf people in a small village in Israel's Negev desert. This community has developed their own distinct grammatical structure. This structure favors a particular word order: Subject-Object-Verb, as in "Man Book Give", unlike in English, where it is Subject-Verb-Object (Man Give Book). This structure is also different from languages spoken in the neighborhood of the village (Arabic or Hebrew). Researchers (Mark Aronoff: Stony Brook University, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler: University of Haifa and Carol Padden: University of California, San Diego) found that ABSL has a complex grammar, that goes beyond questions about 'now' and 'here' (e.g. come here, go there), but can also deal with questions about 'how' and 'when'. Such complex structures, can tell us a lot about what it means to build a language from scratch, without any prior knowledge of any other language.
The Al-Sayyid village (population: 3500) was founded about 200 years ago, by a group of people with congenital deafness. Inter-marriage in the village has resulted in the birth of 150 deaf people in the last three generations. The deaf people are fully integrated with the non-deaf people in the village, and they all can communicate via this sign language. The language propagates from generation to generation like any other language, thus providing researchers unique insights into the birth and development of a new language.
For the present study, the researchers focused on the second generation of ABSL signers. Further work will document the evolution of the language in the third generation.