ERC Starting Grant

During spontaneous sign language genesis, signers naturally integrate gestures into their grammars. Researchers have studied this process in two famous cases: Nicaragua and Israel’s Negev desert. The EU-funded ELISA project will be studying Kata Kolok, a third sign language that emerged six generations ago due to high incidences of deafness in a Balinese village. The project aims to identify the earliest stages of this language and the mechanisms that shaped its emergence. It will focus on signing varieties in Bali to directly compare the various stages of language emergence. Through this comparative approach, it will chart the birth and development of a modern human language over the course of a century.