Malaysian Sign Language: a Phonological Statement

Malaysian Sign Language: A phonological statement Hope M.Malaysian Sign Language Hurlbut SIL International Malaysian Sign Language (MSL) is the language used in daily communication by the Deaf in Malaysia.1 It was developed from American Sign Language (ASL), which was introduced to the Penang School for the Deaf in the mid 1970s. Many local signs have been added to the language until it now has approximately 75 percent similarity with ASL. The Deaf of Malaysia prefer to use the national language term for their language: Bahasa Isyarat Malaysia (literally ‘Language of Signs of Malaysia’). There are two other signed languages in Malaysia. One is Penang Sign Language, which was developed by the school children in the Penang School for the Deaf in the 1950s and 1960s. The other is Selangor Sign Language, which was developed by some Deaf from ASL, which they learned in the 1960s and 1970s in Kuala Lumpur. When they were older, these individuals went to the Penang School for the Deaf and added many signs from Penang Sign Language to their repertoire of signs. The latter two sign languages are only used by some of the older Deaf now, as most of them have learned Malaysian Sign Language and few of them are passing on their own sign language to their children. (See Hurlbut 2003.) In the study of any language, we know that the language can be broken down into increasingly smaller units. As Valli & Lucas (1998) note in their chapter on Phonology, “Phonology is the study of the smallest contrastive units of language. For spoken languages, those contrastive units are sounds, and linguists study how the sounds in a language are structured and organized.” They then show the similarity between spoken languages and signed languages by saying, “Sign language linguists use the term phonology to refer to the study of how signs are structured and organized.” * I first met Dr. McKaughan in the southern Philippines in the mid 1970s. He and I and one or two others were guests in the home of an American lady working with the Summer Institute of Linguistics. He had come back to the Philippines to do some further research on the Maranao language, which he had worked on before. At that time, I knew very little about the languages of the Philippines or those of any other country in Asia for that matter. I was fascinated to hear his stories about his time spent previously in the Philippines. After that our paths crossed more and more frequently, until he began to help in the research on the Iranun people of Sabah, Malaysia. Iranun is a language related to Maranao in the Philippines. Not only did I get to know him better, but also met some of his Iranun colleagues who were developing the language. I have always admired Dr. McKaughan, and much later, I also met his wife Bobbie after he began working on the Iranun language. I am not sure that a linguistics paper on a sign language is appropriate for an Austronesian linguist, but I am sure that anything to do with linguistics will catch his attention. 1 Following a convention proposed by James Woodward (1972), we use the “lowercase deaf when referring to the audiological condition of not hearing, and uppercase Deaf when referring to a particular group of Deaf people who share a language [...] and a culture [...,] have inherited a sign language, use it as a primary means of communication among themselves, and hold a set of beliefs about themselves and their connection to a larger society.” (Padden & Humphries 1988:2.) Loren Billings & Nelleke Goudswaard (eds.), Piakandatu ami Dr. Howard P. McKaughan, 157–178. Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines and SIL Philippines, 2010. 158 HOPE M. HURLBUT 1. Basics of sign-language phonology The first to study the phonemes of a sign language was Stokoe (1960). He provided evidence that signs are made up of parts, and showed that ASL must be regarded as a language, not merely a gestural system as was the prevailing view at that time. His pioneering work has affected subsequent research on ASL as well as other signed languages. Stokoe proposed that each sign be composed of three parameters, which have come to be referred to as LOCATION, HANDSHAPE, and MOVEMENT. Since then, others have added three further parameters used to form a sign: ORIENTATION, which direction that the palm of the hand faces; CONTACT, where one or both hands touch each other or the signer; and NONMANUAL SIGNALS, such as facial expressions and body movements. Signs can be distinguished by a change in one of the parameters. For example, a change in handshape indicates a change in the meaning of the sign. The MSL word CHICKEN consists of the thumb and index finger pointing forward from the mouth and opening and closing like a bird’s beak. The word DUCK is identical except that the thumb, index, and middle finger are used with the same place of contact and the same movement. See Figure 1. The difference is analogous to the difference between [t] and [d], which occur at the same point of articulation but differ in voicing. Figure 1 Signs can be one- or two-handed. In the past, most signs were two-handed, but now there is a tendency to simplify the signs and use only one hand. For two-handed signs both hands may have the same handshape and work in unison or alternate. Other two-handed signs have different handshapes for the DOMINANT and NONDOMINANT hands. (It is usually the case that left- and right-handed signers use the left and right hand, respectively, as their dominant hand.) In ASL, when the nondominant hand has a supporting role, it is called the BASE HAND. There are seven different handshapes that are possible in ASL for the base hand: B, A, S, C, O, 1, 5 (Battison, 1978). See Figure 2. The Dominance Condition: “(a) If the hands of a two-handed sign do not share the same specification for handshape (i.e. they are different), then (b) one hand must be passive while the active hand articulates the movement, and (c) the specification of the passive handshape is restricted to be one of a small set: B, A, S, C, O, 1, 5.” (Battison, 1978:35) In MSL there are many different handshapes used for the base hand, but some of them are very rare. The ones that are common, and are comparable to the base handshapes found MALAYSIAN SIGN LANGUAGE 159 Figure 2 in ASL are mainly the same ones as found in ASL, but several of them have more than one form. These are: B (3 forms), A (and its allophone S), C (2 forms), O (2 forms), 1 and 5 (2 forms). See Figure 3. In choosing the base forms the author went through 244 pages of hand written text to find the occurrences of a base hand where the dominant hand had a different handshape. It was noted that [o] and [a] are quite rare as they only comprised 2 percent each of the base hands. Figure 3 One of the commonest base hands is the closed B. Other handshapes of the dominant hand can contact the base hand in various ways, such as touching, hitting, rubbing, etc. Additional base hands that are found in MSL are the letter L and the closed letter G. The only sign in the text corpus where the closed G occurred as a base was in the word SEW. The base hand was a closed G and the dominant hand was an F. See Figure 4. Figure 4 160 HOPE M. HURLBUT Another group of base hands is a special set of ordinal numerals. When the Deaf are telling stories about sports, a favourite theme, the base hand uses these ordinal numerals to list the position of the winners. Some of the shapes are the same as for the cardinal numerals, but others are different, and the orientation of the palm is also different. These base hands are found in Figure 5 below. The dominant hand signs the sign name of the relevant winner at the same time as he/she signs the numeral. Figure 5 1.1 Handshapes There are differences of opinion as to the number of handshapes used in different signed languages. In ASL Liddell & Johnson (1998) found more than 150 hand configurations. Others have found as few as 50 or so. In Malaysian Sign Language there are over 80 handshapes (Appendix A), some of which only seem to be used for names and other special uses such as TAXI, which uses “t-i” simultaneously with sideways movement. See Figure 6. Many signs are made with only one handshape throughout the sign, e.g. TEACH which is signed at either side of the forehead using a flattened O-shape, (Figure 6 and Table 1) and both hands moving forward simultaneously, as if to pass on knowledge from the signer to the signee. Some Malaysians use a C-shape from the Malay word cikgu meaning TEACHER. See Appendix B. Other signs are made with two (occasionally three) different handshapes. For example, TEACHER starts at the forehead the same as TEACH, moving forward, then dropping down and changing to a flat hand on either side of the body. The handshape changes from a closed hand to an open hand. In other signs, the handshape changes from an open hand to a closed hand as in the sign for the word WANT (both 5-hands are out and Figure 6 MALAYSIAN SIGN LANGUAGE 161 palms oriented up, then the hands are pulled toward the body and form fists or S’s with the palms still oriented up).

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