The Birth and Rebirth of Sign Language Studies

As most readers of this journal are aware, Sign Language Studies (SLS) served for many years as effectively the only serious scholarly outlet for work in the nascent field of sign language linguistics. Now reaching its fortieth anniversary, the journal was founded by William C. Stokoe and then edited by him for the first quarter century of its existence. The SLS community of readers will generally be receptive to the claim that Bill Stokoe was also the founder of the emerging field just mentioned. In January 1989 Stokoe himself published a fairly detailed account of the journal’s first sixteen years (although published at the beginning of 1989, his paper had been written in 1988). We cannot do better than to allow Bill to tell the story in his own words, and following is an extended extract from his account of those early years, especially how he entered the desktop publishing business, as well as that of journal editing. It is noted here that the illness that necessitated the withdrawal of his wife, Ruth, from partnership with him in 1987 was Alzheimer’s disease, which led first to complete disability and, ultimately, her death in 1998. So, the following passage was written during an exceptionally difficult time in his life. Not only was his wife showing signs of a terrible disease, but, as we will see later, he was finding it increasingly difficult to continue editing and publishing the journal.

Bill begins his account by describing how he got into a scholarly field that was almost as untouchable at that time as sign language linguistics—that of the origin and evolution of language in general—and how he founded the publishing business that he named Linstok Press:¹

A symposium on the origins of language at the 1972 American Anthropological Association meetings in Toronto was stimulating to its participants and enthusiastically received by many in attendance. Nevertheless, the seven formal papers and commentaries on them remained unpublished, although two or three university presses and at least one small private publisher had been approached. As the reopening of a topic anthropological and linguistic societies had mooted long ago, it evidently appeared unmarketable. Nevertheless, I joined the two organizers of the symposium in an attempt to publish it despite that assessment. My secretary in the Gallaudet College Linguistics Research Laboratory, of which I was then director, prepared camera-ready copy on a proportional-spacing IBM Executive typewriter equipped with a reasonably book-like font. I designed the book, added a second paper by one of the presenters, a lengthy bibliography of the subject, and commentaries by the three co-editors.

The typist’s time was paid for, as a legitimate cost of research reporting, from an NSF grant: the book contained two chapters resulting from our research. The cost of printing and binding 1000 copies and of a small direct-mail promotion were mine personally, as were the embarrassments of publishing inexperience when Language Origins was published in November 1974 and mailed to contributors and others, along with a twenty-four-page saddle-stapled insert containing a list of errata and a revision of its chapter 6.

This initial venture into desktop publishing did not produce the personal tax loss I had half expected. One or two anthropologists used the volume in their teaching; its critical success was assured when Charles F. Hockett reviewed it with three other books on the topic in 1978; and the remaining copies, warehoused for years in the basement of my home, were sold out shortly thereafter.

The next step toward desktop publishing followed a suggestion by Thomas A. Sebeok (then Distinguished Professor at Indiana University) that I edit an international journal on sign language linguistics. The journal, Sign Language Studies, was first published in 1972² by Mouton under an arrangement with the Indiana University Research Center in the Language Sciences. Edited at Gallaudet, it was electronically typeset in Indiana, offset printed in Michigan, and published and distributed in the Netherlands. Begun as a semi-annual, it had gained, I understood, a fair number of subscribers before Mouton, in 1974...