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Al-Sayyid is a village in Israel, populated by congenitally-deaf people. Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). The seeds emerged spontaneously among the first deaf residents and, three generations later, it has flowered into a complex language capable of expressing anything a spoken one can. Since its discovery by linguists in 2000, ABSL has captivated researchers driven by two fundamental questions: how did language emerge, and what can that tell us about the nature of the human mind? ABSL offers a unique opportunity to test a theory that has dominated linguistics since the 1950s. Put forth by Noam Chomsky, it claims that language is an innate and uniquely human trait, programmed into our genes. Children are born with a "language instinct" that compels them to effortlessly acquire whatever language (or languages) they are immersed in as toddlers.

Singing is a form of communication that uses language and adds a beat. There are countless people who advocate that the power of music helped them get through rough times because if helped them verbalize their emotions. Music and singing can evoke such strong feelings in humans. By contrast, gesturing also seems quite natural. After all, before we can convey our thoughts to other fluent speakers, we rely on gesturing. This article explores how singing and signing have influenced our speaking. Moreover, which one came first?!

"Koko, arguably the world's most famous gorilla, has died at the age of 46. Known for her ability to communicate through sign language, Koko forever changed our conceptions of primate intelligence and emotional capacities."

Chinglish signage (signs originally in Mandarin but oddly translated to English) is being "cleaned up." Meaning that about 400,000 street signs' odd English phrases were replaced with ones to make sense. Many enemies of Chinglish say that laughing at its poorly translated signs and other mis-translations are instead humiliating. However, there are many that believe Chinglish to be its own language that, while it sounds odd to the Western ear, is directly able to translate the lyrical aspect of Mandarin.

This article talks about an interesting discovery that our speed to understand language may be able to change, as deaf people, who are more used to sign language, were also quicker to recognize human body language unrelated to sign language.

Lera Boroditsky, cognitive science professor at UC San Diego notes, "...a growing body of research is documenting how experience with language radically restructures the brain. People who were deprived of access to language as children (e.g., deaf individuals without access to speakers of sign languages) show patterns of neural connectivity that are radically different from those with early language exposure and are cognitively different from peers who had early language access. The later in life that first exposure to language occurs, the more pronounced and cemented the consequences. Further, speakers of different languages develop different cognitive skills and predispositions, as shaped by the structures and patterns of their languages. Experience with languages in different modalities (e.g., spoken versus signed) also develops predictable differences in cognitive abilities outside the boundaries of language. For example, speakers of sign languages develop different visuospatial attention skills than those who only use spoken language. Exposure to written language also restructures the brain, even when acquired late in life. Even seemingly surface properties, such as writing direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), have profound consequences for how people attend to, imagine, and organize information. The normal human brain that is the subject of study in neuroscience is a "languaged" brain. It has come to be the way it is through a personal history of language use within an individual's lifetime. It also actively and dynamically uses linguistic resources (the categories, constructions, and distinctions available in language) as it processes incoming information from across the senses.

This article writes about how there is a trend for towns to drop apostrophes from street signs because of database lookup issues. Many people were against it because they felt like it was a loss of culture or teaching kids bad grammar. Some do not mind the change because people still understand what it is trying to say.

An anonymous self-styled 'grammar vigilante' has revealed that he has spent years changing offending shop signs in the dead of night. Wielding an 'apostrophiser' - a broom handle laden with two sponges and a number of stickers - the man has corrected tens of missing and misplaced apostrophes on shop banners across Bristol, England over the past 13 years.

"Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."

Long lost footage documenting the deaf community's fight for civil rights is being shown in cinemas across the UK. The British Deaf Association is marking its 125th anniversary with a film made from footage dating back to the 1930s which was rescued from a skip.

Common misconceptions about swearing are that the user is lazy with his words or uneducated, but Benjamin Bergen, Professor of cognitive sciences at UCSD, says otherwise.

Although not spoken, it counts as an actual language.

When Nicaraguan teachers failed to communicate with their 200 deaf students, the students worked together to create a linguistic structure of their own. Judy Kegl, a sign-language expert was contacted to try and decode their new language.

This article talks about the rare speech disorder apraxia. Children diagnosed with apraxia have trouble saying certain sounds because the muscles in their mouth aren't able to make the movements required to make the sounds. The article talks about how sign language, along with other treatments, can help children learn to speak verbally.

How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects. The study - the first linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence - was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2005.

Deaf children are able to develop a language-like gesture system by making up hand signs and using homemade systems to increase their communication as they grow, just as children with conventional spoken language.