Mutual intelligibility among the sign languages of Belgium and the Netherlands

Sáfár, Anna; Meurant, Laurence; Haesenne, Thierry; Nauta, E.; Weerdt, Danny De; Ormel, Ellen

doi:10.1515/ling-2015-0004

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…However, abandoning the notion of "language" altogether does not seem to be helpful for capturing the phenomena that contact linguists care about Bolonyai, 2011, 2019); clearly, language users do draw upon language boundaries as being meaningful as they selectively deploy linguistic material from across their repertoires (Höder, 2014). These resources themselves are used to separate languages, as in the aforementioned case of mouthing being used to separate French-Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) from Flemish Sign Language (VGT) (Sáfár et al, 2015). Indeed, while the ideological and theoretical challenges of language categorisation from the perspective of the linguist are relevant on their own, perhaps more relevant for explaining the mechanisms of contact-induced change are the factors which determine language categorisation by language users.…”

Section: Code-switching Borrowing and Language Boundariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Language Contact

Bisnath,

Namboodiripad

2023

Preprint

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Language contact research is often concerned with understanding which bounded language(s) are the source of particular linguistic forms, and identifying and explaining (in)consistencies across contexts of language contact. The field tends to place its focus on contexts in which variable use of linguistic forms is particularly salient, leading to interest in language change, shift, and minoritised languages. This chapter draws on linguistic anthropology and usage-based contact linguistics. We frame language contact broadly, as being the study of the exchange of semiotic resources across boundaries. Identification of the right boundaries becomes a core part of contact linguistics then, as resources are dynamically and differentially associated with particular social labels, including named languages. We argue that processes typically ascribed to contact (e.g. borrowing) are found across all contexts of language use. This approach has the advantages of, (a) Rejecting colonialist and essentialist characterisations of languages and language users which obscure the variable and opportunistic use of semiotic resources that typifies all language use; (b) Expanding beyond traditional, unimodal analysis to include multimodal, semiotic resources used in interaction; (c) Appealing to language users’ subjectivities, as opposed to top-down groupings, to account for the use of semiotic resources.

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Section: Code-switching Borrowing and Language Boundariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mouthing may also reflect the spoken-language multilingualism of the local context. For instance, in Belgium, there is minimal reported difference between French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) and Flemish Sign Language (VGT), except that French mouthing is found in the former and Dutch mouthing in the latter (Sáfár et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Contact

Bisnath,

Namboodiripad

2023

Preprint

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Mother left, Father right

Nyst,

Schüller

2024

DIA

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Studies of diachronic change in sign languages are only available for a small number of sign languages, in part due to the scarcity of historical resources for sign languages. This article presents the first study of diachronic change in Nederlandse Gebarentaal ‘Dutch Sign Language’ (NGT) and Vlaamse Gebarentaal ‘Flemish Sign Language’ (VGT). It looks at the impact of an artificial sign system on the lexicons of the Gestel variant of NGT and the Limburg variant of VGT. The recovery of two 19th century manuscripts describing 3,000 signs and 7,000 signs of this system respectively enables us to compare this artificial system with published data for NGT and VGT from the 1950s and the present. We focus on the resilience of an artificial distinction that is not considered distinctive in other natural sign languages, i.e., an absolute left/right distinction for gender marking in kinship terms. The results show that the NGT and VGT variants have partially changed or replaced all the artificial signs, except UNCLE/AUNT, NEPHEW/NIECE in NGT and PARENTS in VGT. The partial changes shed light on the mechanisms through which artificial elements are nativized to fit the phonological system of these sign languages. The changes observed in the left/right paradigm have implications for our understanding of the distribution of laterality in sign language phonology in general. Finally, the impact of the highly restricted access to language models that were part of the strict oralist approaches in these school, and the consequent impoverished language input on diachronic change and lexical innovation are discussed.

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Weak hand holds in two sign languages and two genres

Sáfár

Kimmelman

2015

SL&L

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In this paper, we provide a quantitative analysis of weak hand holds based on corpus data. We include both a cross-linguistic analysis of these holds in narrative data from Russian Sign Language (RSL) and Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), and a language-internal, cross-genre analysis comparing NGT narrative and conversational data. We classified the functions of all holds found in two corpora of RSL and NGT, and analyzed their formal characteristics. We found that holds in RSL and NGT have similar functions. However, holds are significantly more frequent in RSL than in NGT. In addition, we found that the distribution of holds across different functions varies between different genres in NGT. The similarities between RSL and NGT in the domain of holds may be attributed to modality effects. The differences in frequency of holds ask for a language-specific explanation, and we discuss several possible scenarios.

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Mutual intelligibility among the sign languages of Belgium and the Netherlands

Cited by 8 publications

References 12 publications

Language Contact

Language Contact

Mother left, Father right

Weak hand holds in two sign languages and two genres

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