The Sociolinguistics of Sign Languages (review)

The chapters of this collection were written by fifteen contributors—nine from the United States and three each from the United Kingdom and Ireland. The editor’s twenty-year teaching experience at Gallaudet University for deaf and hard-of-hearing students was the stimulus for this book. Among her aims for the publication were to reinforce the status of American Sign Language (ASL) as a real language by demonstrating that it has a ‘sociolinguistic life’ like other languages, and to show that ‘the study of sign language sociolinguistics has had a direct impact on the lives of deaf people’ (6–7). (Throughout the volume the adjective ‘deaf’ refers primarily to hearing loss, and ‘Deaf’, with uppercase D, to social collectivities and attitudes arising from interaction among people with hearing losses.)

In Ch. 2, ‘Multilingualism: The global approach to sign languages’ (8–32), Bencie Woll, Rachel Sutton-Spence, and Frances Elton provide an overview of the occurrence of sign languages (SLs) around the world. Determining the number of existing SLs is just as difficult as coming up with the number of languages spoken today, but there appear to be at least one hundred SLs. In discussing them, many of the same criteria used for spoken languages are found to apply, such as mutual intelligibility as the basis for distinguishing between SLs and SL dialects, the concept of standard SLs vs. regional dialect signs, and historical relationships among SLs.

Jean Ann takes up bilingualism and language contact in Ch. 3 (33–60). Among the questions she poses are: Is there both societal and individual bilingualism in the Deaf world? (There is great diversity among ‘speakers’, ranging from native signers who are also fluent in a spoken language to native signers of an SL who learned another SL as a second language.) Is there diglossia in the Deaf world? (At present, spoken languages are generally considered to be more prestigious [high] than SLs [low].) Do SLs borrow signs from each other? What is the relevance of pidgins, creoles, and codeswitching to SL research? To sum up, many parallelisms exist between spoken languages and SLs, but some aspects of SLs are unique to signing.

The core of the book is Ch. 4, ‘Sociolinguistic variation’ (61–111), by Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, Clayton Valli, Mary Rose, and Alyssa Wulf. They conclude that while many social factors that influence variation are the same for SLs and spoken languages (e.g. age, gender, and socioeconomic class), some factors appear to be unique to SL variation or must be understood within the context of Deaf education.

Ch. 6, ‘Language planning and policy’ by Timothy Reagan (145–80), is followed by two appendices. The first, a declaration passed at the Third European Congress on Sign Language Research held in Hamburg in 1989, ends with a six-point demand for political action, including public financing of interpreting services, support of autonomous cultural activities of the deaf, and the recognition by national parliaments of both SLs and of the deaf as a language minority (177).

This book will serve not only as an up-to-date source of information about SLs as fully comparable to spoken languages, but also as a textbook. Each chapter is followed by suggested readings and exercises, and there is a comprehensive bibliography (217–48).