In the first part of this article the authors consider the policies that apply to Uruguayan Sign Language (Lengua de Senas Uruguaya; hereafter LSU) and the Uruguayan Deaf community within the general framework of language policies in Uruguay. By analyzing them succinctly and as a whole, the authors then explain twenty-first-century innovations.…

Despite being minority languages like many others, sign languages have traditionally remained absent from the agendas of policy makers and language planning and policies. In the past two decades, though, this situation has started to change at different paces and to different degrees in several countries. In this article, the author describes the…

This article presents a portrait of two community-level and legal efforts in Canada to obtain official recognition of ASL and LSQ (Langue des signes quebecoise), both of which are recognized as official languages by the Canadian Association of the Deaf (CAD). In order to situate this issue in the Canadian linguistic context, the authors first…

The role of languages is a central issue in deaf education. The function of sign languages in education and deaf students' opportunities to develop linguistic abilities in both sign languages and the dominant language(s) of a society are key considerations (Hogan-Brun 2009; Reagan 2010, 53; Swanwick 2010a). Accordingly, what Kaplan and Baldauf…

The article is written in the tradition of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's theory of basic color terms. According to this theory there is a universal inventory of eleven basic color categories from which the basic color terms of any given language are always drawn. The number of basic color terms varies from 2 to 11 and in a language having a fully…

Examinations of the etymology of American Sign Language have typically involved superficial analyses of signs as they exist over a short period of time. While it is widely known that ASL is related to French Sign Language, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of this historic relationship between their lexicons. This article presents…

Hearing native signers often learn sign language as their first language and acquire features that are characteristic of sign languages but are not present in equivalent ways in English (e.g., grammatical facial expressions and the structured use of space for setting up tokens and surrogates). Previous research has indicated that bimodal…

In this paper we examine the theory of the structure of signs that grew from Stokoe's (1965) proposals. We begin by examining argument for the structural simultaneity of signs by examining claims about how signs contrast and how cheremes function. Historically, such discussions have involved three claims: (1) that signs are composed of a single…

The purpose of this study was to compare important characteristics of sign language programs in institutions of higher education in the United States in 1994 and 2004. Data were collected regarding (a) program structure, (b) program content and resources, and (c) opinions and recommendations of program administrators. Data show that sign language…

This article proposes an answer to the primary question of how the American Sign Language (ASL) community in the United States conceptualizes (im)politeness and its related notions. It begins with a review of evolving theoretical issues in research on (im)politeness and related methodological problems with studying (im)politeness in natural…

This article discusses a survey study that drew on seventy-five high school students at a residential deaf school in Japan. The aim of the survey was to examine the various ways in which deaf adolescents use text messaging and to determine whether they use the technology differently from the hearing high school students surveyed in our previously…

The arguments for dividing the signing stream in signed languages into sequences of phonetic segments are compelling. The visual records of instances of actually occurring signs provide evidence of two basic types of segments: postural segments and trans-forming segments. Postural segments specify an alignment of articulatory features, both manual…

In this article we describe a componential, articulatory approach to the phonetic description of the configuration of the four fingers. Abandoning the traditional holistic, perceptual approach, we propose a system of notational devices and distinctive features for the description of the four fingers proper (index, middle, ring, and pinky).…

This article argues for the necessity of phonetic analysis in signed language linguistics and presents a case study of one analytical system being used in a preliminary attempt to identify natural classes and investigate variation in ASL handshapes. Robbin Battison (1978) first described what is now a widely accepted list of basic handshapes,…

Lexical variation abounds in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and is commonly associated with the introduction of the Australasian Signed English lexicon into Deaf education in 1979, before NZSL was acknowledged as a language. Evidence from dictionaries of NZSL collated between 1986 and 1997 reveal many coexisting variants for the numbers from one…