1 - The Phylogeny of Sign Language

Abstract

This chapter discusses the phylogeny of sign language. Language, like every other part of culture, has had an evolutionary career, and the roots of language may be as deeply grounded in our biological constitutions as for instance our predisposition to use our hands. The chapter discusses the sign language used by animals such as chimpanzees, gorilla, pongids, and orangutan. The pongid communication is multimodal, and the hand, arm, and foot gestures by pongids are usually accompanied by significant facial expressions, glances, body positions, and body movements. In modern times, sign languages have occasionally emerged to fulfill the communication needs of one or a few profoundly deaf members in larger hearing communities. While European monastic sign languages, the complex gesture languages of South Indian dance drama, the various sign languages in use around the world in tribal and other societies, and the modern sign languages of the deaf and of the workers in specialized occupations occupy only a tiny fraction of the time span considered in the phylogenetic model, their study should illuminate much of what is now very imperfectly known about the properties and capacities of such communication systems.