International Sign (IS) and American Sign Language (ASL) have both been used as lingua francas within international deaf contexts. Perspectives on the uses of IS and ASL as lingua francas in such contexts are connected to discourses pertaining to the form, function, status, value, languageness, and global reach of IS and ASL. While there are some…

The linguistic and cognitive importance of early language exposure for deaf children is well reported in the literature. However, most of such studies have been conducted in industrialized countries with less of such studies conducted in developing and nonindustrialized countries such as Ghana. Therefore, hinged on the social interactionist theory…

This article analyzes the construction of sign names in an emerging sign language from Mexico, the Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL). Data comes from elicited interviews as well as natural interactions collected by the authors and signers from two different villages, Chicán and Nohkop. Despite YMSL being an isolate language, sign name construction…

The article poses questions about which (meta)linguistic discourses and processes take place among Deaf queers in Berlin, Germany: Which topics and reflection processes they deal with?; Which expressions, self-designations, and foreign appellations in sign language do Deaf queers consider as acceptable or as discriminatory?; How can the Deaf-queer…

Several scholars have asked what are the relations between two recently developed concepts, Deaf ethnicity and Deafhood. The emergence of these concepts, along with others such as "audism" (Humphries 1977), "dysconscious audism," "Sign Language Peoples," and "Deaf Gain" reflects important attempts by Deaf…

This combined paper will focus on the description of two selected lexical patterns in Saudi Arabian Sign Language (SASL): metaphor and metonymy in emotion-related signs (Young) and lexicalization patterns of objects and their derivational roots (Palmer and Reynolds). The over-arcing methodology used by both studies is detailed in Stephen and…

This article begins by examining the historical and social factors that led to 1901 being the "deafest" year in major league baseball history with four deaf players. In particular, the author discusses the career of William Ellsworth "Dummy" Hoy, a deaf man from Ohio who became the most celebrated deaf player in history and…

This article traces the development of the "Deaf President Now" (DPN) movement and its similarities to the black civil rights movement. Movements typically begin with a concrete, precipitating event but are usually the result of known or shared incidents on the part of the participants, and the "Deaf President Now" movement…

Information and research on Mongolian Sign Language is scant. To date, only one dictionary is available in the United States (Badnaa and Boll 1995), and even that dictionary presents only a subset of the signs employed in Mongolia. The present study describes the kinship system used in Mongolian Sign Language (MSL) based on data elicited from…

Research presented here describes the sign names and the customs of name allocation within the British Deaf community. While some aspects of British Sign Language sign names and British Deaf naming customs differ from those in most Western societies, there are many similarities. There are also similarities with other societies outside the more…

Interest in research on Estonian Sign Language, or eesti viipekeel (EVK), has been increasing. Studies have been conducted on different aspects of EVK, such as ways of expressing time (Trukmann 2006) and color terms (Hollman and Sutrop 2007, Hollman 2008). Moreover, EVK has lately received more attention in legislation. The language obtained an…

A sociolinguistic survey of the sign language used by the deaf communities of Peru was conducted in November and December of 2007. For eight weeks, our survey team visited six deaf communities in the cities of Lima, Arequipa, Cusco, Trujillo, Chiclayo, and Iquitos. Using sociolinguistic questionnaires and recorded text testing (RTT) tools, we…

This article discusses the role of technology in supporting ASL literacy. This attention to technology is part of an exploratory study of Deaf elementary school students participating in an ASL identity text project at a bilingual/bicultural school for Deaf students in Ontario, Canada. This study is a contribution to the cross-Canada…

This article describes efforts at the University of California, San Diego in the Education Studies Program to develop and field-test a teacher preparation program that combines best practices in bilingual education and deaf education. The training curriculum designed for this program relies on research that finds a correlation between ASL fluency…

Suggests considering the following before creating abbreviations of sign languages: the recognition of signed languages as official languages; the standardization of signed languages; the existence of different signed languages using the same spoken language as a substitute language; whether attention should be given to countries whose names share…