The Sociolinguistics of Sign Languages

When he first started his teaching, there were readings from 1960s and 1970s; however, new studies have been required with the growing importance of sign language community's needs and empowerment.In the introduction part Lucas states the history of sign language studies, today's situations and his reflections on the importance of the sociolinguistic research for Deaf communities.In the book, there are six main areas to examine which are multilingualism, bilingualism, sociolinguistic variation, discourse analysis, language planning and policy and language attitudes.The first topic which Woll, Sutto-Spence and Elton deal with is Multilingualism.In this chapter, the global approach to sign languages is discussed.The first issue to be clarified is sign languages used by hearing people.It is widely explained that how hearing people use their sign languages which are different from Deaf communities' sign languages.Next, existing languages are discussed and it is said that there are 6.703 languages according to Ethnologue database (Ethnologue database 1996).Mutual intelligibility and problems of nomenclature are the next stated subtopics.Mutual intelligibility is stated to be an important issue because two nations' languages may be very similar; however, they may be accepted two different languages (ex.Swedish and Danish, New Zealand Sign Language and Australian Sign Language).Afterwards, naming sign languages in Europe is defined, which states according to European Union of the Deaf's study, sign languages' names are defined by the specific region of the country (Belgium, Spanish sign languages, etc.).Another issue discussed in this chapter is historical relationships of languages.In spoken languages family trees of languages may show the origins of the languages; however, sign languages may not be divided into families; only some patterns and relationships may be defined.Lastly the issue how world politics and educational systems affect sign languages is discussed.