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Lets say we put 40 infant children together, only giving them food with no other interaction exept among themselves, would they spontaneously create at least a basic language?

Well, ignoring the (un)ethical aspects of this, noone knows.

I've heard that twins can create their own secret language in addition to their mother tongue. I don't know if they would be real languages; to me it sounds more realistic that they use ciphers or some other code and not an actual original language. Have anyone made studies in this department? Linguists with twins? Of course that requires the children to cooperate, and why should they if it is a secret language...

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It's well enough studied that we know it's not just a cipher.

And there's examples of this happening, to some extent: NICARAGUAN SIGN LANGUAGE, dudes. It's happened and we know what happens. A language with complexities in its grammar appears. That's what happens.

I don't have System's sources, but I imagine that only a group of speaking children who knew the same language would have the chance to create a cipher, and they would be unlikely to replace words they already knew. (Does simply creating new vocabulary constitute a cipher if one doesn't know the existing lexicon? I remember 'naming' things I didn't know the word for when I was younger.)
A group of speaking children from different language groups would probably create a creole and create new vocabulary from there.
A group of non-speaking children would almost certainly create their own language: communicating in any consistent manner would require it.

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Well, the Nicaraguan sign language is a really interesting example in that it can't really borrow words productively from its surrounding languages (on account of not being spoken in the same manner - it's not easy to take Spanish words and make gestures out of them, and although I bet a method of alphabetic transsigning exists in it, I bet no one's willing to use that method for the bulk of vocab)

I don't believe so, no. Language development happens at a very young age, but if there is nothing to instill the development and move it along, it seems that if dies off considerably. There are psychology cases from the 19th and 20th century that show what happens to children who do not have their language abilities nurtured at a young age.

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But all these were examples of 1 child alone, or 1 child with only non human animals. What if it was a group of human children, thats what i'm intirested in.

It's an interesting idea, one I have thought a lot about since highschool, but it is ultimately unethical anyway. Even if a language happened, it would not be completely spontaneous, as there is evidence that even in the womb children begin to become accustomed to their mothers language on a very base level, so already the experiment is contaminated. And even if there were a group of, say, deaf women, there would still be zero way that a large enough portion of children would be acquirable. And even then, even if there was a large enough population to be willing to allow their children to participate, it would still be completely unethical.

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Dotjen
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We are talking hypothetically, the feasibility of the experiment is irrelevant.

Don't you *READ*? NICARAGUAN SIGN LANGUAGE already. ALREADY answered all salient points in your post, dude!

You can start with Wikipedia.

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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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Dotjen
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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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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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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).