5 What is sign language

“It differs from other languages in one major respect of its features: it does not rely on spoken words.”
J. G. Kyle & B. Woll, Sign Language: The Study of Deaf People and Their Language.

5.1 Introduction

Sign languages are complex visual-spatial languages used by deaf communities. There are many such languages, e.g. American Sign Language (ASL), French Sign Language (FSL), Japanese Sign Language (JSL), Swedish Sign Language (SSL), etc. Sign languages have their own historic origins around the world, develop along their own individual lines (Steinberg 1982:78), use different signs and sentence structure. Even if the same spoken language is used by different societies, e.g. English, the differences between sign languages used by deaf communities in these societies may vary to the extent of precluding mutual comprehension,² as happens between American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) (Crystal 1987:220).

Similarly to a spoken language, when a sign language becomes widely used it may undergo strong dialectical and regional variation. This can be observed, for example, in the case of American Sign Language which is used by over half a million deaf people, to many of whom it is a native language. The major factors contributing to variation are geographical, although the age at which the sign language is learned plays a crucial role, as well as the home environment (whether the parents are deaf), and the educational background of the signer. A further important variable is the extent to which the sign language has been influenced by the language of the majority (spoken language) in the society. For example, in the USA the dialect continuum of ASL ranges from those varieties which show no influence of spoken language to those that have been markedly shaped by the properties of English, especially by word order. Several pidgin varieties of signing also exist along this continuum (Crystal 1987:221).

As it appears, contrary to the common belief, there is no universal sign language. Although a sign form called Gestuno was developed by the World Federation of the Deaf for use at international conferences of deaf people, it is more a vocabulary of signs than a language (Nakamura 1999:1-2, BDA 1975). In Europe, a lingua franca under the name of the International Sign Language has been developed, but the attitudes of the deaf to using it are controversial (Nakamura 1999:1-2).

Sign languages use hand, face, head, or other body movements in a three-dimensional space as the physical means of communication (Steinberg 1982:73).

Signs can be articulated with one hand or two. In a two-handed sign, a distinction should be drawn between the active and the passive hand, or the strong and the weak hand (Engberg-Pedersen 1993:35-36). Also, signing can be right-dominant whereby the signer uses his/her right hand as the strong hand and the left hand as a weak hand, or left-dominant (here the signer tends to use his/her left hand as the strong hand and the right as the weak hand) (Engberg-Pedersen 1993:35-36).

The space of signing is bounded by the top of the head, the back, the space extending to elbow width on the sides, and to the hips; different points on the body serve as locations for hand configurations (see Figure 1 by Rodda & Grove 1987).

Figure 1. The signing space and place of articulation signing parameter (Rodda & Grove 1987:132).

These points, however, are not evenly distributed: the greatest number of contrasting locations for signs are found on the face, that is, signs are not located at a great distance from the face when articulated (Kyle & Woll 1994:3893). This can be explained by perceptual constraint which affects the reception of signs, and by constraint relating to sign production (Kyle & Woll 1994:3893).

It should be emphasised that hand configurations form only ONE component of sign languages (this refutes the argument that sign languages are “gestural” languages), since facial expressions such as eyebrow motion and lip-mouth movement are not only used for conveying attitude and referring to objects through size, but also have a crucial part at the grammatical level, performing syntactic, indexic, or conversation regulatory (discourse) functions, (as well as morphological functions (cf. Davies 1985)). (For a full discussion of non-manual markers see Engberg-Pedersen 1990, Vogt-Svendsen 1990, Baker-Shenk 1985, Aarons et al. 1992, Ebbinghaus & Hessmann 1996). In a word, “a string of manual signs can mean different things depending on the non-manual marking that accompanies it” (Aarons 1994:41).