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The Sociolinguistic Situation of Natural Sign Languages
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Abstract:
The study of signed languages can reveal whether or not sociolinguistic phenomena previously observed for spoken languages are general across modalities. In fact, like spoken languages, signed languages exhibit variation related to age, race, sex, and religion, and like other minority languages within majority cultures show effects of language contact (despite the difference of modality between the minority and majority languages). The situation of signed languages as minority languages produces in their users ambivalent attitudes toward both the signed language and the language of the hearing community, parallel to those experienced by speakers of creoles or other minority languages. As with creoles, varieties of signed languages can be viewed as varying along a continuum between the pure form of the signed language and the spoken standard, with the variety used depending on factors such as the hearing status of the interlocutor, the formality of the occasion, and so forth. In its pure form, the signed language is a different language which employs some grammatical mechanisms which are radically different from spoken ones, because of the linguistic use of visual space. For signed languages, unlike for spoken ones, schools do not serve as a force for standardization, since in most countries codes for the standard language are used in education of deaf children, rather than natural sign languages. The use of these codes contributes to lexical variation in the sign languages to some degree, but large-scale invasion of vocabulary items from the majority language is resisted both for cultural reasons and because of constraints governing the formation of signs.
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Articles
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URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/10.3.294
http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/10/3/294
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