Emerging Sign Languages
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Deaf Culture, History and Sign Language in France May-June, 2021 (Specific Dates TBA)
Deaf Culture, History and Sign Language in France May-June, 2021 (specific dates TBA) ASL 113 - French Sign Language and Deaf Culture in France (4 Cr.) The ASL program at the University of Rochester, located in Rochester New York, is offering a unique study abroad experience in France in Summer 2021. It is open to Deaf and hearing college-level ASL students and professionals. This three-week program gives ASL users an opportunity to learn French Sign Language and French Deaf Culture in both formal and informal settings to further their understanding of the international Deaf World. It is available to anyone who meets the prerequisites (see below); it is not limited to University of Rochester students. A native Deaf French faculty member from UR is affiliated with several faculty members in the Deaf community and they jointly plan the program, schedule, and curriculum offered to ASL students and professionals. This 4-credit program will focus on basic and advanced learning of conversational LSF (French Sign Language) and on field trips fostering a broad understanding of French Deaf Culture and general French Culture in Paris (weeks 1 & 2) and in regions beyond the capital (week 3). Students will attend classes on LSF and French Deaf History and Culture in the first week. They will also attend guided tours of culturally significant sights such as renowned museums, Deaf theater, Lyon and other villages and Deaf schools. All classes and tours will be conducted in LSF and International Sign. Study will begin before going to France, as students will receive the course syllabus and materials for review and familiarization. -
Sign Language Typology Series
SIGN LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY SERIES The Sign Language Typology Series is dedicated to the comparative study of sign languages around the world. Individual or collective works that systematically explore typological variation across sign languages are the focus of this series, with particular emphasis on undocumented, underdescribed and endangered sign languages. The scope of the series primarily includes cross-linguistic studies of grammatical domains across a larger or smaller sample of sign languages, but also encompasses the study of individual sign languages from a typological perspective and comparison between signed and spoken languages in terms of language modality, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to sign language typology. Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Languages Edited by Ulrike Zeshan Sign Language Typology Series No. 1 / Interrogative and negative constructions in sign languages / Ulrike Zeshan (ed.) / Nijmegen: Ishara Press 2006. ISBN-10: 90-8656-001-6 ISBN-13: 978-90-8656-001-1 © Ishara Press Stichting DEF Wundtlaan 1 6525XD Nijmegen The Netherlands Fax: +31-24-3521213 email: [email protected] http://ishara.def-intl.org Cover design: Sibaji Panda Printed in the Netherlands First published 2006 Catalogue copy of this book available at Depot van Nederlandse Publicaties, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag (www.kb.nl/depot) To the deaf pioneers in developing countries who have inspired all my work Contents Preface........................................................................................................10 -
A Lexicostatistic Survey of the Signed Languages in Nepal
DigitalResources Electronic Survey Report 2012-021 ® A Lexicostatistic Survey of the Signed Languages in Nepal Hope M. Hurlbut A Lexicostatistic Survey of the Signed Languages in Nepal Hope M. Hurlbut SIL International ® 2012 SIL Electronic Survey Report 2012-021, June 2012 © 2012 Hope M. Hurlbut and SIL International ® All rights reserved 2 Contents 0. Introduction 1.0 The Deaf 1.1 The deaf of Nepal 1.2 Deaf associations 1.3 History of deaf education in Nepal 1.4 Outside influences on Nepali Sign Language 2.0 The Purpose of the Survey 3.0 Research Questions 4.0 Approach 5.0 The survey trip 5.1 Kathmandu 5.2 Surkhet 5.3 Jumla 5.4 Pokhara 5.5 Ghandruk 5.6 Dharan 5.7 Rajbiraj 6.0 Methodology 7.0 Analysis and results 7.1 Analysis of the wordlists 7.2 Interpretation criteria 7.2.1 Results of the survey 7.2.2 Village signed languages 8.0 Conclusion Appendix Sample of Nepali Sign Language Wordlist (Pages 1–6) References 3 Abstract This report concerns a 2006 lexicostatistical survey of the signed languages of Nepal. Wordlists and stories were collected in several towns of Nepal from Deaf school leavers who were considered to be representative of the Nepali Deaf. In each city or town there was a school for the Deaf either run by the government or run by one of the Deaf Associations. The wordlists were transcribed by hand using the SignWriting orthography. Two other places were visited where it was learned that there were possibly unique sign languages, in Jumla District, and also in Ghandruk (a village in Kaski District). -
Sign Language Endangerment and Linguistic Diversity Ben Braithwaite
RESEARCH REPORT Sign language endangerment and linguistic diversity Ben Braithwaite University of the West Indies at St. Augustine It has become increasingly clear that current threats to global linguistic diversity are not re - stricted to the loss of spoken languages. Signed languages are vulnerable to familiar patterns of language shift and the global spread of a few influential languages. But the ecologies of signed languages are also affected by genetics, social attitudes toward deafness, educational and public health policies, and a widespread modality chauvinism that views spoken languages as inherently superior or more desirable. This research report reviews what is known about sign language vi - tality and endangerment globally, and considers the responses from communities, governments, and linguists. It is striking how little attention has been paid to sign language vitality, endangerment, and re - vitalization, even as research on signed languages has occupied an increasingly prominent posi - tion in linguistic theory. It is time for linguists from a broader range of backgrounds to consider the causes, consequences, and appropriate responses to current threats to sign language diversity. In doing so, we must articulate more clearly the value of this diversity to the field of linguistics and the responsibilities the field has toward preserving it.* Keywords : language endangerment, language vitality, language documentation, signed languages 1. Introduction. Concerns about sign language endangerment are not new. Almost immediately after the invention of film, the US National Association of the Deaf began producing films to capture American Sign Language (ASL), motivated by a fear within the deaf community that their language was endangered (Schuchman 2004). -
The Guardian (UK)
9/16/2016 The race to save a dying language | Ross Perlin | News | The Guardian T he race to save a dying language The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community? by Wednesday 10 August 2016 01.00 EDT 4726 Shares 52 Comments n 2013, at a conference on endangered languages, a retired teacher named Linda Lambrecht announced the extraordinary discovery of a previously unknown language. Lambrecht – who is Chinese-Hawaiian, 71 years old, warm but no- nonsense – called it Hawaii Sign Language, or HSL. In front of a room full of linguists, she demonstrated that its core vocabulary – words such as “mother”, “pig” and I “small” – was distinct from that of other sign languages. The linguists were immediately convinced. William O’Grady, the chair of the linguistics department at the University of Hawaii, called it “the first time in 80 years that a new language has been discovered in the United States — and maybe the last time.” But the new language found 80 years ago was in remote Alaska, whereas HSL was hiding in plain sight in Honolulu, a metropolitan area of nearly a million people. It was the kind of discovery that made the world seem larger. The last-minute arrival of recognition and support for HSL was a powerful, almost surreal vindication for Lambrecht, whose first language is HSL. For decades, it was stigmatised or ignored; now the language has acquired an agreed-upon name, an official “language code” from the International Organization for Standardization, the attention of linguists around the world, and a three-year grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. -
Alignment Mouth Demonstrations in Sign Languages Donna Jo Napoli
Mouth corners in sign languages Alignment mouth demonstrations in sign languages Donna Jo Napoli, Swarthmore College, [email protected] Corresponding Author Ronice Quadros, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, [email protected] Christian Rathmann, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, [email protected] 1 Mouth corners in sign languages Alignment mouth demonstrations in sign languages Abstract: Non-manual articulations in sign languages range from being semantically impoverished to semantically rich, and from being independent of manual articulations to coordinated with them. But, while this range has been well noted, certain non-manuals remain understudied. Of particular interest to us are non-manual articulations coordinated with manual articulations, which, when considered in conjunction with those manual articulations, are semantically rich. In which ways can such different articulators coordinate and what is the linguistic effect or purpose of such coordination? Of the non-manual articulators, the mouth is articulatorily the most versatile. We therefore examined mouth articulations in a single narrative told in the sign languages of America, Brazil, and Germany. We observed optional articulations of the corners of the lips that align with manual articulations spatially and temporally in classifier constructions. The lips, thus, enhance the message by giving redundant information, which should be particularly useful in narratives for children. Examination of a single children’s narrative told in these same three sign languages plus six other sign languages yielded examples of one type of these optional alignment articulations, confirming our expectations. Our findings are coherent with linguistic findings regarding phonological enhancement and overspecification. Keywords: sign languages, non-manual articulation, mouth articulation, hand-mouth coordination 2 Mouth corners in sign languages Alignment mouth demonstration articulations in sign languages 1. -
CENDEP WP-01-2021 Deaf Refugees Critical Review-Kate Mcauliff
CENDEP Working Paper Series No 01-2021 Deaf Refugees: A critical review of the current literature Kate McAuliff Centre for Development and Emergency Practice Oxford Brookes University The CENDEP working paper series intends to present work in progress, preliminary research findings of research, reviews of literature and theoretical and methodological reflections relevant to the fields of development and emergency practice. The views expressed in the paper are only those of the independent author who retains the copyright. Comments on the papers are welcome and should be directed to the author. Author: Kate McAuliff Institutional address (of the Author): CENDEP, Oxford Brookes University Author’s email address: [email protected] Doi: https://doi.org/10.24384/cendep.WP-01-2021 Date of publication: April 2021 Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) School of Architecture Oxford Brookes University Oxford [email protected] © 2021 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-No Derivative Works (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 License. Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................ 4 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 5 2. Deaf Refugee Agency & Double Displacement ............................................................................. -
What Sign Language Creation Teaches Us About Language Diane Brentari1∗ and Marie Coppola2,3
Focus Article What sign language creation teaches us about language Diane Brentari1∗ and Marie Coppola2,3 How do languages emerge? What are the necessary ingredients and circumstances that permit new languages to form? Various researchers within the disciplines of primatology, anthropology, psychology, and linguistics have offered different answers to this question depending on their perspective. Language acquisition, language evolution, primate communication, and the study of spoken varieties of pidgin and creoles address these issues, but in this article we describe a relatively new and important area that contributes to our understanding of language creation and emergence. Three types of communication systems that use the hands and body to communicate will be the focus of this article: gesture, homesign systems, and sign languages. The focus of this article is to explain why mapping the path from gesture to homesign to sign language has become an important research topic for understanding language emergence, not only for the field of sign languages, but also for language in general. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. How to cite this article: WIREs Cogn Sci 2012. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1212 INTRODUCTION linguistic community, a language model, and a 21st century mind/brain that well-equip the child for this esearchers in a variety of disciplines offer task. When the very first languages were created different, mostly partial, answers to the question, R the social and physiological conditions were very ‘What are the stages of language creation?’ Language different. Spoken language pidgin varieties can also creation can refer to any number of phylogenic and shed some light on the question of language creation. -
Sign Language Ideologies: Practices and Politics
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Heriot Watt Pure Annelies Kusters, Mara Green, Erin Moriarty and Kristin Snoddon Sign language ideologies: Practices and politics While much research has taken place on language attitudes and ideologies regarding spoken languages, research that investigates sign language ideol- ogies and names them as such is only just emerging. Actually, earlier work in Deaf Studies and sign language research uncovered the existence and power of language ideologies without explicitly using this term. However, it is only quite recently that scholars have begun to explicitly focus on sign language ideologies, conceptualized as such, as a field of study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first edited volume to do so. Influenced by our backgrounds in anthropology and applied linguistics, in this volume we bring together research that addresses sign language ideologies in practice. In other words, this book highlights the importance of examining language ideologies as they unfold on the ground, undergirded by the premise that what we think that language can do (ideology) is related to what we do with language (practice).¹ All the chapters address the tangled confluence of sign lan- guage ideologies as they influence, manifest in, and are challenged by commu- nicative practices. Contextual analysis shows that language ideologies are often situation-dependent and indeed often seemingly contradictory, varying across space and moments in time. Therefore, rather than only identifying language ideologies as they appear in metalinguistic discourses, the authors in this book analyse how everyday language practices implicitly or explicitly involve ideas about those practices and the other way around. -
The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology Author(S): Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler Source: Language, Vol
Linguistic Society of America The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology Author(s): Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler Source: Language, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Jun., 2005), pp. 301-344 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4489895 Accessed: 07-02-2019 20:08 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Thu, 07 Feb 2019 20:08:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE PARADOX OF SIGN LANGUAGE MORPHOLOGY MARK ARONOFF IRIT MEIR WENDY SANDLER Stony Brook University University of Haifa University of Haifa Sign languages have two strikingly different kinds of morphological structure: sequential and simultaneous. The simultaneous morphology of two unrelated sign languages, American and Israeli Sign Language, is very similar and is largely inflectional, while what little sequential morphology we have found differs significantly and is derivational. We show that at least two pervasive types of inflectional morphology, verb agreement and classifier constructions, are iconi- cally grounded in spatiotemporal cognition, while the sequential patterns can be traced to normal historical development. -
The French Belgian Sign Language Corpus a User-Friendly Searchable Online Corpus
The French Belgian Sign Language Corpus A User-Friendly Searchable Online Corpus Laurence Meurant, Aurelie´ Sinte, Eric Bernagou FRS-FNRS, University of Namur Rue de Bruxelles, 61 - 5000 Namur - Belgium [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract This paper presents the first large-scale corpus of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) available via an open access website (www.corpus-lsfb.be). Visitors can search within the data and the metadata. Various tools allow the users to find sign language video clips by searching through the annotations and the lexical database, and to filter the data by signer, by region, by task or by keyword. The website includes a lexicon linked to an online LSFB dictionary. Keywords: French Belgian Sign Language, searchable corpus, lexical database. 1. The LSFB corpus Pro HD 3 CCD cameras recorded the participants: one for 1.1. The project an upper body view of each informant (Cam 1 and 2 in Fig- ure 1), and one for a wide-shot of both of them (Cam 3 in In Brussels and Wallonia, i.e. the French-speaking part of Figure 1). Additionally, a Sony DV Handycam was used to Belgium, significant advances have recently been made record the moderator (Cam 4 in Figure 1). The positions of of the development of LSFB. It was officially recognised the participants and the cameras are illustrated in Figure 1. in 2003 by the Parliament of the Communaute´ franc¸aise de Belgique. Since 2000, a bilingual (LSFB-French) education programme has been developed in Namur that includes deaf pupils within ordinary classes (Ghesquiere` et al., 2015; Ghesquiere` et Meurant, 2016). -
Negation in Kata Kolok Grammaticalization Throughout Three Generations of Signers
UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM Graduate School for Humanities Negation in Kata Kolok Grammaticalization throughout three generations of signers Master’s Thesis Hannah Lutzenberger Student number: 10852875 Supervised by: Dr. Roland Pfau Dr. Vadim Kimmelman Dr. Connie de Vos Amsterdam 2017 Abstract (250 words) Although all natural languages have ways of expressing negation, the linguistic realization is subject to typological variation (Dahl 2010; Payne 1985). Signed languages combine manual signs and non-manual elements. This leads to an intriguing dichotomy: While non-manual marker(s) alone are sufficient for negating a proposition in some signed languages (non- manual dominant system), the use of a negative manual sign is required in others (manual dominant system) (Zeshan 2004, 2006). Kata Kolok (KK), a young signing variety used in a Balinese village with a high incidence of congenital deafness (de Vos 2012; Winata et al. 1995), had previously been classified as an extreme example of the latter type: the manual sign NEG functions as the main negator and a negative headshake remains largely unused (Marsaja 2008). Adopting a corpus-based approach, the present study reevaluates this claim. The analysis of intergenerational data of six deaf native KK signers from the KK Corpus (de Vos 2016) reveals that the classification of KK negation is not as straightforward as formerly suggested. Although KK signers make extensive use of NEG, a negative headshake is widespread as well. Furthermore, signers from different generations show disparate tendencies in the use of specific markers. Specifically, the involvement of the manual negator slightly increases over time, and the headshake begins to spread within the youngest generation of signers.