Old Signs, New Signs, Whose Signs?: Sociolinguistic Variation in the NZSL Lexicon

Although New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) is used by a closely networked national Deaf community, it exhibits considerable variation in the lexicon that has been anecdotally and empirically attributed to age and region. This article reports a quantitative study that examined the effects of age, region, gender, and ethnicity on variation in eighty target vocabulary items, across 138 Deaf NZSL users. The dataset consisted of 11,040 tokens, in which 249 distinct variants for the 80 items were identified. Findings confirmed that age group is the strongest social correlate of lexical variation. Marked diachronic variation and change, shown by the "apparent-time" method of comparing age groups, reflects the impact of the adoption of Australasian Signed English in deaf education from 1979 in replacing and supplementing the earlier lexicon. A strong leveling effect found in the lexicon of younger signers is also attributable to their use of this sign system in education. Some regional effects found, and a pattern of interaction between region and age group—with southern and older signers tending to conserve early variants. Gender and ethnicity played a minimal role in explaining variation in this analysis. Given the salience of gender and ethnicity in sociolinguistic variation studies generally, this finding may be explained by the particular socio-historical profile of the NZSL community, or by the likelihood that these identity characteristics are indexed by sub-lexical features, and/or by the decontextualized data elicitation method, which may not capture the potential use of lexical variants that respond to audience, topic and style considerations in discourse contexts.