Sign language as a window into language origins
No quiz this week since I won’t be able to provide feedback.
Most human languages can trace an unbroken chain of transmission stretching back many thousands of years. However, for some individuals, and in some communities, this chain of language transmission is broken, and new languages form in response to the communicative and social needs of the members of those communities, a kind of natural experiment which potential provides unique insights into the origins of language. The emergence of new sign languages provides a striking example of language creation. Deaf individuals cannot access the spoken language of their community, and in many communities, hearing people lack knowledge of existing signed languages; deaf children therefore have no access to a language model. However, when deaf individuals are brought together in stable communities, new sign languages emerge. Newly emergent sign languages have been discovered and documented world-wide - Nicaraguan Sign Language is one celebrated example, but there are numerous other cases, including in Israel, Ghana, Indonesia and Turkey.
The reading for this week would have been Senghas (2005), which provides a brief summary of the circumstances in which new sign languages emerge, and some interesting thoughts on critical social factors in the creation of new sign languages. The author, Ann Senghas, does important work on Nicaraguan Sign Language, another celebrated case of the creation of a new language in real time.
If you want a fairly detailed but manageable primer on sign language, both from a structural and cognitive perspective, you could check out Sandler & Lillo-Martin (2017).
Both articles are available on the University network.
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.