Contact Sign

A contact sign language, or contact sign, is a variety or style of language that arises from contact between a deaf sign language and an oral language (or the written or manually coded form of the oral language). Contact languages also arise between different sign languages, although the term pidgin rather than contact sign is used to describe such phenomena.

Contact sign has been characterized as "a sign language that has elements of both [a] natural sign language and the surrounding [oral] language".

Language contact is extremely common in most deaf communities, which are almost always located within a dominant oral language ('hearing') culture. Deaf people are exposed to the oral language that surrounds them, if only in visual forms like lip reading or writing, from early childhood. Hearing parents and teachers of deaf children, if they sign at all, are usually second language learners, and their signing style will exhibit features of interference from the oral language. A mixing of languages and modes may also occur when interpreting between a spoken and a sign language.

While deaf sign languages are distinct from oral languages, with a different vocabulary and grammar, a boundary between the two is often hard to draw. A language 'continuum' is often described between signing with a strong sign-language grammar to signing with a strong spoken-language grammar, the middle-regions of which are often described as contact sign (or Pidgin Sign). In a conversation between a native signer and a second-language learner, both conversation partners may be signing at different ends of the spectrum. A blend that is often seen is vocabulary from the sign language signed in the word order of the oral language, with a simplified or reduced grammar typical of contact languages.

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