Sign languages (review)

Twenty-five chapters (including an instructive introduction) by fifty-two scholars offer information about over forty sign languages. Assessing how many sign languages there are in the world is difficult both because countries rarely include information about sign in censuses and because the determination of what counts as a language versus a less-developed gestural system is tricky. Still, the number of sign languages studied here is impressive, particularly since most here are genetically unrelated. This book is a treasure trove.

Many early studies of sign languages aimed to establish their status as bona fide natural languages and, thus, focused on properties in common with spoken languages. Once that basic issue was confirmed, attention turned to how modality differences affect grammar and the behavior of language communities, thus allowing us to advance our knowledge both of cognitive aspects of language and psychosocial factors pertinent to language use. The introduction to this volume beautifully lays out three advantages of considering sign languages in this regard. First, analysis of a sign language can make clear what visual properties of the phonetic system motivate structural linguistic properties, opening the door for linguists to seek out what auditory properties of the phonetic system do the same in spoken languages. Second, iconicity in sign languages is readily accessible and apparent in a much wider range of data than generally found in spoken language, so its role can be examined closely. I would add that studying the ways in which sign iconicity yields to grammatical properties over time and the ways in which it yields to randomness over time (due to the inherent limitations of iconicity with respect to conveying isolated lexical items) can help us better understand the ways in which spoken language iconicity changes over time, as well as offer a perspective on the development and evolution of writing systems. Third, since new sign languages are emerging around the globe, study of sign languages offers data about the emergence of language that are otherwise unavailable. Already, study of sign languages (e.g. Nicaraguan Sign Language) has taught us that language evolution can proceed far more rapidly than had previously been hypothesized. To all these, one could add the advantage that studying sign languages offers us information on typology of language. Since sign languages use different articulators with different capabilities from those of spoken language and since their organization involves visual parameters as opposed to auditory parameters, possibilities for variation among sign languages come up that do not arise in spoken language. By looking at the ways that sign languages group together, we can enrich our inventory of the factors around which languages typologize in general and thus enhance our knowledge of language in general. In sum, if you are not already convinced that we no longer have to let the lingu(a) of linguistics limit our vision of our field, this volume will help remove remaining blinders, with articles written by renowned scholars (the contributors list is almost a who’s who of sign linguistics) and touching on so many issues that linguists of any ilk can find something to dig into here.

Part 1 is on the history of sign languages and their generational transmission. From around World War I until the 1950s, Switzerland practiced sterilization of deaf people, forbade marriage among the deaf, and put deaf women in institutions, all in an effort to eradicate deafness. Today, eighty percent of deaf children get cochlear implants (CI), and typically do not sign. While deaf groups advocate use of sign, oral-only deaf people contradict them. Schools for the deaf have produced few graduates who qualify to enter universities. No universities have faculty positions specializing in sign language so little research has been done on Swiss sign languages. While sign languages are not officially oppressed, they are not officially recognized, and deafness is still considered a malady in need of cure. All this information is just part of the first article, by Penny Boyes Braem and Christian Rathmann, which goes on...