Two languages at hand

Abstract

This article explores patterns of co-use of two sign languages in casual conversational data from four deaf bilinguals, who are fluent in Indian Sign Language (ISL) and Burundi Sign Language (BuSL). We investigate the contributions that both sign languages make to these conversations at lexical, clause, and discourse level, including a distinction between signs from closed grammatical classes and open lexical classes. The results show that despite individual differences between signers, there are also striking commonalities. Specifically, we demonstrate the shared characteristics of the signers’ bilingual outputs in the domains of negation, where signers prefer negators found in both sign languages, and wh-questions, where signers choose BuSL for specific question words and ISL for general wh-questions. The article thus makes the argument that these signers have developed a fairly stable bilingual variety that is characteristic of this particular community of practice, and we explore theoretical implications arising from these patterns.

One Village, Two Sign Languages: Qualia, Intergenerational Relationships and the Language Ideological Assemblage in Adamorobe, Ghana

“…There are typically one or more minority sign languages and a majority sign language, and minority signers usually learn the majority sign language (Adam ). (2) International migration and mobility (e.g., Quinto‐Pozos ; Zeshan and Panda ). And (3) The context of “ shared sign languages” (Nyst ), which are the languages that emerged in shared signing communities (Kisch ) like Adamorobe, where intergenerational hereditary deafness in close‐knit (often rural) communities constituted the breeding grounds for the emergence of local sign languages, i.e., shared sign languages (De Vos and Pfau ; Zeshan and De Vos ).…”

Sign-speaking: The structure of simultaneous bimodal utterances

“…More recently, unimodal sign bilinguals, who use more than one sign language, have also been the subject of research (Adam, 2012a;Quinto-Pozos & Adam, 2015). Available studies involve Mexican Sign Language and American Sign Language (ASL) (Quinto-Pozos, 2002); British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language (Adam, 2012b); and Burundi Sign Language and Indian Sign Language (Zeshan & Panda, 2015).…”

“…the sequential alternation between both languages (Muysken, 2000;Myers-Scotton, 2002), although there are some differences. For instance, both Quinto-Pozos (2002) and Zeshan and Panda (2015) report that there is a substantial degree of lexical overlap between the two sign languages in question, in part due to the shared iconicity of signs. This often makes it difficult to determine which sign language a particular sign in an utterance should be assigned to, and consequently causes difficulty in determining the switch points from one language into another during codeswitching.…”

“…Quinto-Pozos (2002) makes reference to the quadrilingual situation of language contact between Spanish, English, ASL, and Mexican Sign Language. Zeshan and Panda (2015) mention the complex multilingual profiles of sign language users from Burundi who live in India. On the other hand, bimodal multilingual situations involving more than two languages are, to our knowledge, undocumented in the literature.…”

“…conditioned behaviour that exists in a community of practice, in terms of Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992), and Zeshan and Panda (2015). The bimodal-bilingual behaviour is driven by the communicative needs of participants in this particular setting, and by the signspeaker's motivation to convey the same information to all who are present, in the absence of a separate sign language interpreter.…”