Answer to questions (in written English)

Below are the answers to questions in written English

1. A lot of my hearing friends and acquaintances who are not familiar with sign languages, Deaf Culture, and of course sign linguistics would often assume that sign languages are ‘codes’ ‘created’ based on spoken languages and that they are not ‘independent’ enough when they are for instance, borrowing mouthings from speech. The notion of ‘sign languages are independent from speech’ does not seem convincing to them even when I explained how sign languages follow their own grammatical rules, and how they have their own phonological parameters, etc.. How would you explain the independence and dependence of sign language(s)? And how would you explain the relationship between speech and sign language, say, Dutch and Dutch Sign Language?

Thank you for the relevant question: indeed it can be hard for newcomers to deaf communication to see the difference between signed and spoken language if signing is always richly supplemented by elements of the spoken language. A few comments in response:

First, a suggestion that works well for Dutch/Dutch Sign Language, is to write out a sign language sentence in lower-case words, that is, to translate the signing word-for-word. In most spoken languages, that leads to ingrammatical sentences. (Not for all sentences of course, but it’ll be easy to pick one with different word order than the spoken language, or with a repeated pointing pronoun at the end.) In my experience this helps give hearing people a grip on why the sign language is different from the spoken language. Another example that people can easily see as a case of sign-specific grammar is the rich use of space and the inflection of verbs in space: that, too, clearly shows that sign languages are not just ‘manual spoken languages’.

Second, it’s good to point out that whereas there are monolingual speakers of the spoken language in question, there are bound to be no monolingual signers of the sign language: as sign languages have emerged in hearing societies where the spoken language (or languages) was the norm, language contact is inevitable and bound to occur. In a multilingual city such as Hong Kong (Cantonese/English), there will always be language contact. We know this from endless spoken language examples, and only more recently (in the last two decades, I would say), we have come to appreciate how much language contact there is between a signed and a spoken language. (There’s some discussion on whether this is the case for ‘village sign languages/shared signing communities’, but my take on that is that we haven’t done enough research in such communities to establish how the language contact takes place, after all there are other ways of sign/spoken mixing or blending than the use of mouthings.) So, in fact it would be rather surprising if we would not see language contact having an impact on the sign languages, which are always the smaller language in any society.

Finally, as I point out at the end of the second lecture, there may be many other types of language contact (such as borrowing of idiomatic multi-word expressions from the spoken language) that we simply haven’t looked at yet as part of the repertoire of ‘real sign language’. That means that I don’t think we know enough yet to fully answer the question how a sign  language and a spoken language in a community are related.

BTW, I’m not sure how this is in your community, but language contact can also go the other way: young hearing speakers in the Netherlands sometimes use the ‘I love you’ handshape/sign from ASL, effectively borrowing a sign into their spoken repertoire. I’m sure this will happen more in the future in the Netherlands, now more hearing people are learning NGT. And perhaps also in your country?

[Author]

Posts