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The problem comes with learning languages the way a young child does from its parents. Neglect also causes other developemental issues. Like the inability for one to tell if someone loves you, cares about you, and the inability to trust others. I know someone with this issue. Isolation just never was good for group animals like humans.

When not isolated, children who are born deaf had created sign language. Also, human language had to have started somewhere. Perhaps the same way some sign languages did?

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Know phrases in more languages than can fit in this signature.
Speaks English and Spanish.
Reads Sumerian.
There is more.

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Dotjen
Kotanese

Dear Systemzwang:

NICARAGUAN SIGN LANGUAGE comes close to answering the initial question, closer than most. However....

1) There were toneladas of students enrolled at that school where they met and formed a (language) community. They were of different ages, some older and with more ideas and experiences than the younger younglings. NONE were infants, and ALL were well older than the 2-year old marker.

2) They were NOT enrolled at the Villa Libertad Vo-Tech School of Managua from birth. It was a school, not an orphanage.

3) It seems MOST had been using one or another system of hand-signals for simple actions & requirements (comida, agua, comer, beber, dormir) called "memeticas" in the Spanish of Nicaragua. How "common" these gestures are from household to household and from village to village is debatable, but apparently there was some kind of an input from the various students before contact with one another.

4) Initially, the "Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense" is more of a pidgin, a mixture of partial systems of communication through hand signals that developed into a "manu franca" for all the students to use. With time, it underwent creolization, which has been documented. Syntacic language, Here we come!!!

So.......Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense did not develop out of a complete vacuum. Various (incomplete) systems of hand-sign "proto-languages" were already in existence and made contributions via the student-interlocutors.

It's pretty close, closer than most other options, but still not the total "ex nihilo" from birth scenario in the initial parameters of the question set.

Pero todavia soy aficionado y fanatico de la historia de Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense !!!!!! ;^)

The situation is similar enough that we can be pretty sure that something very similar would happen if the things were changed to live up to the specifications given - it's seriously close enough for that.

As pointed by other posters, a big difference is that the Nicaraguan children did receive some sort of linguistic / communicational stimulus from their families.

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grammaire du jrawélien - textes - lexique - miscellanées

It's told about few kings in history they made this experiment. I read it on Wiki, but I don't remeber the article.

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Speedlang

I think that modern human children have that propensity to build upon whatever they listen to and find useful to express their needs.

Would children ex nihilo create a "language". If completely alone from birth, I think at best a pidgin. But their children would creolize it and make it more languagey, for sure, following some more syntactic structure, morphemic bits popping up and stabilizing with regularity (young children's propensity for analogy and hypercorrection in L1 acquisition would facilitate this).

There are a lot of factors that would contribute, but I believe that , all other things being equal, the grandchildren of kids brought up in a linguistic vacuum would have their own, fully-fledged language (3 generations).