(Mis)understanding and Obtuseness: “Ethnolinguistic Borders” in a Miniscule Speech Community

Abstract

Building on two of Gumperz's foundational concerns—multilingual speech communities and linguistically linked intercultural miscommunication—I extend (or perhaps reduce) a couple of Gumperzian concepts to an almost limiting case: a single extended family in Chiapas, Mexico, where three deaf siblings interact with their hearing relatives of three generations. Here a spoken Mayan language (along with a little Spanish) is used side by side with a spontaneously emerging homesign or sign language. Linguistic tension emerges from misunderstandings and failures of communication in even this tiny speech community, and the complex pattern of interaction between its members suggests analogues of ethnolinguistic divisions, here even between siblings or parents and children, as well as nascent ideologies of language, mind, and identity familiar from much larger and more diversified speech situations. In particular I examine the crucial nexus of linguistically mediated social relations between the first deaf individual in the family and four categories of others: her parents, her deaf siblings, her hearing siblings, and her young (hearing) child.