Examining linguistic practices and description involved in signed language community‐ researcher collaboration in Việt Nam, this article contributes a case supporting analytic efforts to study the ways “people take up literacy for their own purposes” (Bialostok and Whitman 2006:390). Emerging at the juncture of national speech‐based Deaf education, one signed language–based education project, and Deaf community organizing, these collaborations coalesced in a political climate in which “signs” were construed as a compensatory system for “real” language (Woodward, Nguyễn, and Nguyễn 2004) and as “backward” relative to Vietnamese grammatical structure (Cooper 2014). Using original ethnographic data, microanalysis of two texts reveals that the ways presenters mobilize stances toward linguistic description and one another accrues legitimacy and authority for Deaf sociolinguistic knowledge and Deaf agency while implicitly challenging prevailing language ideologies and hierarchies. Discussion centers on processes of legitimation of Deaf social voices, language invention/disinvention, interpretation/translation, and the significance of ethnography to the present analysis.

Claims about signed languages present a unique resource for examining sociopolitical formation and change. Examining three claims drawn from original ethnographic data on Hồ Chí Minh City Sign Language, analysis centers on the ways language practices and language ideologies reflect, respond to, and impact sociopolitical formation in Việt Nam, particularly in connection to state restructuring of deaf education during the political reform period (1986 to present). Signer narratives evaluate such circumstances in relation to notions of citizenship, national development, and social participation to posit signed language as the basis for Deaf people's contributions to national development and broader social change. Articulations between signed language and sociopolitical formation have been largely ignored within mainstream social science disciplines and global disability-oriented development, hindering theoretical and practical projects. This article aims to expand the theoretical scope of language-centered inquiry by demonstrating how ethnographic research on signed languages contributes to examination of sociopolitical formation. (Signed language, Việt Nam, deaf education, sociopolitical, citizenship)*

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