LEL1B Sign Language Linguistics

BSL

British Sign Language – involves facial expressions and mainly two-handed signs

Auslan

Australian Sign Language – similar to BSL

ASL

American Sign Language – predominantly uses one-handed signs

BASL

Black ASL – a variation of ASL which developed due to segregation in schools

Bengkala, Indonesia

Community where 80% of residents fluently use sign language due to widespread hearing difficulty

Nicaraguan Sign Language

Sign language created by children meeting for the first time in Nicaragua’s first deaf school

Deafblind

People who are both deaf and blind

Protactile Sign Language

A form of sign language often used by deafblind people based on physical touch and direct communication

Distantism

Where blind hearing people (or vice versa) may think themselves more able to make decisions about the blind/deaf communities than deafblind people

International Sign (IS)

Form of sign language taught to aid deaf people around the world in communicating with one enough

Contact language

Where people adjust language to eventually converge and understand each other

Alternative Sign Language

Sign language created by hearing Aboriginal people which utilises sand to add to and create narratives and impart cultural knowledge

National urban sign languages

Well-established sign languages used in large deaf communities/geographic areas and shaped by institutionalisation

Indigenous or rural sign languages

Sign language spoken in small, typically rural communities, typically bounded in a multigenerational area

Family sign languages

Sign languages that evolve organically in families with multiple deaf people, often across generations who may not have access to other sign languages

Homesign

Emerges in environments where deaf people are not exposed to a conventional sign language and develop an idiosyncratic means of communicating with hearing family members

Language deprivation

A phenomenon where someone does not have access to a form of language, causing difficulties with concepts like time, emotions, and relationships

Audism

An attitude based on pathological thinking that results in a negative stigma towards non-hearing people

Communication access

Being able to communicate in some way with others is imperative, regardless of the means

Disability dongles

Technological ‘fixes’ for issues in the provision of accessible language for deaf people that are made without consultation and are often entirely useless or even harmful

Media representation

Deaf people are portrayed in film and television in ways that often perpetuate harmful stereotypes

Deaf gain

A redefinition of deafnoss not as the loss of hearing, but as a form of sensory and cognitive diversity that can contribute to the greater good of humanity

Signing space

An area surrounding a signer where particular spaces may represent people, characters, objects, etc.

Embodiment

Physically ‘becoming’ a character or person by acting out emotions, words, or reactions

Visible surrogate

A character being acted out

Invisible surrogate

A character being interacted with by the visible surrogate

Semiotic resources

Signs and gestures, including mouth gestures, pointing, etc.

Corpus linguistics

Systematically investigating patterns of language variation and use across large samples of language users

Linguistic ethnography

Umbrella term for an interdisciplinary community of scholars bringing together linguistic and ethnographic methodologies in the study of language use in social life