Sign language as a window into language origins
As usual, read this blog, do the reading, and then take the quiz on Learn to test your understanding.
This week will feature a guest lecture by Dr. Annie Holtz.
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. These instances of new language creation are the closest we come to being able to witness the naturalistic origin of new languages. The creators of these new languages are deaf individuals, in contexts where they lack access to existing signed languages.
Deaf individuals cannot directly access the spoken language of the hearing people in their communities, and often the hearing people around them have no expertise in any signed language. Depending on the context, two types of manual language systems emerge in these situations. If the deaf individual remains isolated from other deaf people in a hearing family, they develop a manual language system called homesign, which they mainly tend to use to communicate with their close family and community. In contexts where many deaf individuals come together for extended periods of time, then the conditions are ripe for the birth of a new community-created sign language. Examples of such contexts include the establishment the first school for deaf children in Nicaragua in 1977, or in communities with high levels of hereditary deafness, such as in a rural village in the Central Taurus mountains in Turkey and in the al-Sayyid Bedouin community in Israel. The relative recency with which many of these sign languages have emerged means that researchers have been able to observe and analyse the developmental trajectory of these languages, by comparing the language of different generations (or cohorts), looking at similarities in language change in these signed languages and various spoken languages, and by comparing the data from these communities to behaviours of participants in various experimental studies. In the lecture this week I will show how, with the help of data from these language contexts, we gain a much richer understanding of the trajectory of language evolution.
To introduce you to some of the research which has been conducted on young sign languages, and how these compare to homesign and established sign languages, the reading for this week is Goldin-Meadow et al. (2015). Try to pay special attention to the role that community plays in creating the differences that the authors find between users of these language systems.
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).
Goldin-Meadow, S., Brentari, D., Coppola, M., Horton, L., & Senghas, A. (2015). Watching language grow in the manual modality: Nominals, predicates, and handshapes. Cognition, 136, 381-395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.029
Sandler, W. & Lillo-Martin, D. (2017). Sign Languages. In M. Aronoff and J. Rees-Miller (Eds.) The Handbook of Linguistics (pp. 371-396). Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119072256.ch18
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.