Emergence and Evolutions: Introducing Sign Language Sociolinguistics

Abstract

Emergence and Evolutions:Introducing Sign Language Sociolinguistics Annelies Kusters (bio) and Ceil Lucas (bio) sign languages, rural sign language, village sign language, sociolinguistics, variation, multimodal The very nature of sign languages in society is such that all of the areas of sociolinguistics are relevant to their study (Schembri and Lucas 2015; Roy and Metzger 2014). Sign languages range from national ones such as American Sign Language (ASL; Supalla and Clark 2014); or rural sign languages such Adamorobe Sign Language used in Ghana and in many other communities, where members of a community, both hearing and deaf, use a sign language (Nyst 2007; Zeshan and de Vos 2012); to alternate sign languages (Kendon 1989) such as Plains Indian Sign Language used by the hearing speakers of mutually unintelligible Native American languages and sometimes used also by deaf members of these communities (Davis 2015). Sign languages that have emerged in differing contexts have been used on different scales too: rural sign languages are used locally, in wider language ecologies that feature the ample use of gesture (Branson et al. 1999); national sign languages, which mostly emerged in deaf schools and deaf families are widely used throughout countries and beyond national borders (e.g., in contexts of migration); and some sign languages are used around the world in international contexts, most notably American Sign Language (ASL) and International [End Page 320] Sign (Parks 2014; Parks and Kusters forthcoming). The geographical spread of sign languages has developed largely independently from that of spoken languages, and researchers have identified sign language families (Padden 2011). Sign sociolinguists have documented the varied social contexts of these sign languages, which emerged respectively in mostly deaf contexts (e.g., Palfreyman 2019), in mixed deaf/hearing contexts (e.g., Marsaja 2008), and in mostly hearing contexts (e.g., Kendon 1989), and have proposed accounts on how these contexts of use shape the structures of sign languages (e.g., Schembri et al. 2018; Ellis et al. 2019). Naturally, the sensory asymmetries between deaf and hearing people, and related sensory access to languages impacts on sign languages, their use, and conceptualizations of them (De Meulder et al. 2019). This is one crucial difference between sign language sociolinguistics and spoken language sociolinguistics, which we expand on below. In a Dialogue section of the Journal of Sociolinguistics (vol. 26, no. 1), author pairs introduce a number of themes and debates in sign language sociolinguistics, explore why these are debates; how the debates are situated within sociolinguistics as a whole; and how spoken language sociolinguistics does or does not have similar debates. In order to give authors room to think beyond established subject areas (such as "language contact" or "variationism"), we chose five titles that foreground and represent debates rather than subject areas: Geographies and Circulations; Lumping and Splitting; Hierarchies and Constellations; Classifications and Typologies; Natural and Elicited. These main themes and debates in sign language sociolinguistics, as well as main parallels and differences with spoken language sociolinguistics, are introduced below. Themes in Sign Language Sociolinguistics Sign languages do not exist in sociolinguistic vacuums—sign languages are used in contexts where spoken/written languages, and increasingly also other sign languages are in use. An increasing number of signers are fluent in multiple spoken/written and/or signed languages. In short, multilingualism as concerns deaf and hearing sign language users is an extremely rich topic for investigation (Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen 2004; [End Page 321] Zeshan and Webster 2020). Multilingualism of course is closely linked to language contact, with all of the phenomena attested in spoken language contact and bilingualism also seen in sign language situations, along with some unique ones related to the multimodal nature of sign languages and the sensory asymmetries between deaf and hearing signers. Examples of signed and spoken/written language contact include fingerspelling (i.e., the manual representation of a writing system which has been assimilated into the phonology of many sign languages), the (partial) mouthing of spoken words, codeblending (also called sign-speaking or code-mixing), and chaining (e.g., signing a concept and then fingerspelling it); (e.g., Bagga-Gupta 2000; Holmström and Schönström 2018; Lucas and Valli 1992; Tapio 2019). Adam and Braithwaite (2022...