In a Dialogue section of the "Journal of Sociolinguistics" (vol. 26, no. 1), author pairs introduce a number of themes and debates in sign language sociolinguistics, explore why these are debates; how the debates are situated within sociolinguistics as a whole; and how spoken language sociolinguistics does or does not have similar…

The development of a considerable body of literature on British Sign Language (BSL) now permits analyzing and describing the sociolinguistic history of the language. An impressive amount of sociolinguistic information on BSL pertaining to the United Kingdom (UK) provides rich material for such analysis, but, until now, very little BSL research has…

This paper examines recent lexical expansion in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) in the context of change in the status of the language and ongoing contact with other (spoken and signed) languages. We categorised 917 new signs documented in the past five years according to their source, semantic field, and sign formation mechanism(s), both…

A sociolinguistic style consists of a set of linguistic resources that carry specific meaning within a social context (Campbell-Kibler 2011). One such resource is the use of phonetic variants that do not change the denotative meaning of a word, but are different enough to be recognized as unique. This type of socially constrained phonetic…

In this article, we examine various strategies used to express cardinal numbers in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs) from three historically unrelated communities in Yucatán, Mexico: Chicán, Nohkop, and Cepeda Peraza. Our findings describe some numeral strategies, which remained unattested in previous accounts, and demonstrate that YMSL numerals…

South Africa is a country characterised by great linguistic diversity. Large indigenous languages, such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, are spoken by many millions of people, as well as the languages with European roots, such as Afrikaans and English, which are spoken by several millions and used by many more in daily life. This situation provides a…

Little is known about the nature of fingerspelling during sign language interpretation. In this small-scale, exploratory study, we examined the fingerspelling of interpreters working in five different sign languages: American Sign Language (ASL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan), British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language (ISL), and Italian…

The article discusses the importance of sociohistorical context which is the foundation of variation studies in sociolinguistics. The studies on variation in spoken and signed languages are reviewed with the discussion of geographical and social aspects which are treated as external factors in the formation and maintenance of dialects and those…

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This article presents findings from the first major study to investigate lexical variation and change in British Sign Language (BSL) number signs. As part of the BSL Corpus Project, number sign variants were elicited from 249 deaf signers from eight sites throughout the UK. Age, school location, and language background were found to be significant…

Following a well-established tradition going back to the 1980s (cf. Volterra 1987/2004), the authors use the name Lingua dei Segni Italiana (Italian Sign Language [LIS]) for the language used by Italian deaf people (and by Swiss deaf people living in the Ticino canton). LIS is becoming more and more visible, and its status as a minority language…

Lexical variation abounds in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and is commonly associated with the introduction of the Australasian Signed English lexicon into Deaf education in 1979, before NZSL was acknowledged as a language. Evidence from dictionaries of NZSL collated between 1986 and 1997 reveal many coexisting variants for the numbers from one…

Explores the social relation between a natural sign language and the language of the dominant hearing culture, focusing on language attitudes, status and affiliation, language contact influence, language variation and change, and language standardization. (58 references) (CB)

This article presents the results from a preliminary investigation into the use of fingerspelling in Australian Sign Language (Auslan), drawing on data collected as part of the Sociolinguistic Variation in Australian Sign Language project (Schembri and Johnston 2004; Schembri, Johnston, and Goswell in press). This major project is a replication in…

The variable usage of Negative Incorporation as a phonological process in French Sign Language (FSL) and as a grammatical process in American Sign Language (ASL) is described. In addition, the historical continuum between FSL and ASL despite heavy restructuring is shown. (HP)