Sign Languages of Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea, and their Challenges for Sign Language Typology

Reed, Lauren W.

doi:10.25911/5d69027b5d5f8

2019

DOI: 10.25911/5d69027b5d5f8

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Sign Languages of Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea, and their Challenges for Sign Language Typology

Lauren W. Reed¹

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“…Work by Hou (2016) and Reed (2019) also challenges our assumptions about distinctions between individual home sign systems and community sign languages. Reed (2019) shows how 12 deaf signers in the Bebilyer/Kaugel region of rural Papua New Guinea constitute an intermediary 'sign network' of weak social ties between individuals in a larger region. Palfreyman (2019) argues that sociolinguists should integrate the perspectives of sign community members, though there is of course no guarantee that these will coincide.…”

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confidence: 99%

Lumping and splitting: Sign language delineation and ideologies of linguistic differentiation

Palfreyman

Schembri

2022

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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The terms 'lumper' and 'splitter' have long been used to describe opposing approaches to taxonomy in various fields, such as ethnobiology: on encountering a set of closely related species, splitters name a greater number of distinctions in the set than lumpers (Berlin et al., 1981). Linguists use these terms to describe contrasting tendencies among those documenting and delineating languages (Heine & Nurse, 2000, p. 3): the splitter typically regards varieties as distinct languages, while the lumper tends to treat those varieties as, for example, dialects of the same language.But splitting and lumping are tendencies that lie on the surface and refer to deeper, underlying issues. As with spoken languages, the discourse on delineating and naming signed languages is flavoured by a fundamental quandary: multiple types of linguistic evidence provide few definitive or 'objective' answers to thorny questions about where one language finishes and another one starts, which are often informed by language ideologies and settled in sociopolitical contexts. Such questions are confounded by the ongoing lack of available definitions around terms as basic and fundamental as 'language' (Cysouw & Good, 2013).Attempts to understand the relationships between sign language varieties have focussed mostly on lexical comparison (e.g.

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confidence: 99%

Lumping and splitting: Sign language delineation and ideologies of linguistic differentiation

Palfreyman

Schembri

2022

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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“Switching caps”

Reed

2020

APLV

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Most bilingualism and translanguaging studies focus on spoken language; less is known about how people use two or more ways of signing. Here, I take steps towards redressing this imbalance, presenting a case study of signed language in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. The study’s methodology is participant observation and analysis of conversational recordings between deaf signers. The Port Moresby deaf community uses two ways of signing: sign language and culture. sign language is around 30 years old, and its lexicon is drawn largely from Australasian Signed English. In contrast, culture – which is as old as each individual user – is characterised by signs of local origin, abundant depiction, and considerable individual variation. Despite sign language’s young age, its users have innovated a metalinguistic sign (SWITCH-CAPS) to describe switching between ways of communicating. To conclude, I discuss how the Port Moresby situation challenges both the bilingualism and translanguaging approaches.

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Sign Languages of Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea, and their Challenges for Sign Language Typology

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Lumping and splitting: Sign language delineation and ideologies of linguistic differentiation

Lumping and splitting: Sign language delineation and ideologies of linguistic differentiation

“Switching caps”

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