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.