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Sociolinguistics of sign languages


The sociolinguistics of sign languages is the application of sociolinguistic principles to the study of sign languages. It focuses on the study of the relationship between social variables and linguistic variables and their effect on sign languages. The social variables external from language include age, region, social class, ethnicity, and sex. External factors are social by nature and may correlate with the behavior of the linguistic variable. The choices made of internal linguistic variant forms are systematically constrained by a range of factors at both the linguistic and the social levels. The internal variables are linguistic in nature: a sound, a handshape, and a syntactic structure. What makes the sociolinguistics of sign language different from the sociolinguistics of spoken languages is that sign languages have several variables both internal and external to the language that are unique to the Deaf community. Such variables include the audiological status of a signer’s parents, age of acquisition, and educational background (home acquisition or residence schools). There exist perceptions of socioeconomic status and variation of “grassroots” deaf people and middle-class deaf professionals, but this has not been studied in a systematic way. “The sociolinguistic reality of these perceptions has yet to be explored”. Many variations in dialects correspond or reflect the values of particular identities of a community.

In the Irish deaf community, there are several basic lexical items that are unintelligible between men and women. The vocabularies used by men and women are so different that they have affected communication. The reason for variation was the creation of two sex-segregated schools for the deaf. In this case sociolinguistic variation has been caused by isolation and segregation as implemented by the educational institution. These sex differences have had an effect on behavior in that they perpetuate gender images and relations. The means in which institutionalized language socialization is occurring in Ireland is and has been changing drastically over the past 50 years. This in turn is changing the way Irish sign language is being used and developed.


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