#signed languages

Design by Arnaud Balard. SVG version here.

Text from the World Federation of the Deaf:

"Turquoise Blue represents the deaf community and Sign Language, pride and unity.

Yellow represents the color of light, an enlightened spirit, life and "thriving in unison".

Dark Blue represents the earth, humanity and living in accordance with the planet. It is also the color of the WFD, our logo is blue, we wear blue ribbons in support of deaf people, and deaf cultures all over the world recognize blue as representing deaf people. On the International Day of Sign Languages we even celebrate by shining a blue light! Blue is deeply connected to the roots of the deaf community.

Originally posted here on reddit.

"Hello everyone, I am a PhD student at the University of Georgia studying sign second language acquisition. I am looking for hearing ASL learners to take part in an exploratory study. If you have the time to help out a poor grad student I would greatly appreciate it!"

Video followed by an excerpt from the interview:

Steve: Can you tell me a little bit about the process, how you take the Mi'kmaq Honour Song and turn it into sign language? What was the process?

Holly: It was a little bit of a complicated process because we are talking about translating the Mi'kmaw sung language into signs and how to make those connection points there. So you do have to use colonized languages as a bridge to get there, but we really didn't want to dwell in those spaces for too long, so we spoke with the community, with language keepers, what the words really meant and tried to find equivalents to signs to convey those meanings. So we worked just to feel what the feeling was in each of the words, in each of the concepts, and between the two of us, Sheila and I, we talked about what signs would be the most conceptually accurate to depict those meanings.

Steve: And just out of curiosity, do you also use American Sign Language?

Holly: Yeah, especially during the translation process, we had a lot of those conversations in ASL and we had Mi'kmaw elders, who were hearing people, who spoke to us in English, using ASL-English interpreters and Mi'kmaq spoken language, as well. So we were using all of these languages that we had available to us, plus Sheila and I, taking all of that information, using the old Mi'kmaw signs and the sign language that she has to come up with the language that you see in the Honour Song.

An interesting article about an experiment in language evolution, by Cathleen O’Grady for Ars Technica. Excerpt: 

The children had to play a game similar to charades. One of them had to convey a meaning, like “bicycle” to their partner, who then had to choose the correct picture from an array. The kids weren’t told to gesture—they were just told to communicate and placed in a situation where speech wasn’t an option.

The very youngest children, who were four years old, had to be prompted to use gestures. But six-year-old kids figured it out quickly on their own, and played the game with each other with high levels of success.

The same pictures came up repeatedly throughout the game. This gave the researchers the chance to see what happened when the kids had to refer to the same concept over and over again. They found that the children quickly developed conventions, with their gestures bearing less obvious resemblance to the ideas they were trying to communicate.

In one pair, Bohn says, the child had the tricky task of communicating a blank white space—the idea of “nothing.” After a few failed attempts, she noticed a white spot on her shirt and pulled her t-shirt to the side, pointing to the spot. Her trick worked, and her partner guessed correctly.

In the next round, when the blank image came up again, the other child pulled her shirt to the side and pointed to it—even though her shirt had no white spot. In a single round, the gesture had gone from being tangibly linked to the concept of “nothing” to being completely divorced from it. An outsider looking in wouldn’t be able to figure out what the gesture meant by looking at it—just like in real languages, where no-one can figure out what “elephant” means just from the shape of the word.

In a later experiment, six- and eight-year-old children also started to develop mini-grammars by establishing “words” that they could combine in different ways. For instance, instead of gesturing “a big duck” by using the “duck” gesture with bigger movements, they developed a sign for “big” that they could use with a range of different words. When they combined gestures, they didn’t stick to German word order, which suggests a limit to how much their native language was coming in to play.

Properly closed captioned in English.

Finally! a series about language-in-general that: A) Includes Signed Languages as a matter of course, and B) Makes the point that Signed Languages are just as abstract and arbitrary as spoken languages.

There’s an idea out there (usually, but not exclusively held by Hearing people) that Signed Languages are  just a step or two away from charades, so they’re not considered as “real” as spoken languages, and aren’t included in discussions of how language evolved in our hominid ancestors (as in: assuming that advanced human language couldn’t exist before we had the physical capability to produce complex vocal speech).

And I’ve been trying to push back against that idea for decades, and have not had much luck finding backup sources that I could point to -- until now.