Lexical overlap in young sign languages from Guatemala

Abstract

In communities without older standardized sign languages, deaf people develop their own sign languages and strategies for communicating. These languages vary across several dimensions, including their age, their distribution within the wider spoken linguistic community, and the size of the signing community. Each of these characteristics interacts with the formal and distributional properties of the sign languages that emerge. This study concerns one property of young sign languages used in Nebaj, a community in Guatemala. Specifically, I document the degree of lexical overlap between signers who interact in small local ecologies as well as signers who are part of the same larger linguistic community but do not interact with each other directly. I use the Jaccard similarity index to quantify lexical overlap and find that signers who interact frequently have higher rates of lexical overlap than rates of lexical overlap for all signers. This adds to a growing literature that documents sign languages in diverse communicative settings and suggests that interaction is associated with different levels of lexical overlap or variation. Unique features of the communicative histories of signers of young sign languages are also discussed as factors that contribute to variable rates of lexical overlap in this community.