UCL Linguistics Seminar Talk - Prof Carol Padden

Sign language transmission and spread: The cases of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language and Central Taurus Sign
Abstract: The recent work on different kinds of sign language communities around the world has brought us closer to understanding how sign languages emerge in a community and how they are transmitted to each new generation of signers. Many of our earlier assumptions about the basic properties of sign languages have been revised or even, abandoned, as a result of an increasing diversity of sign languages added to our databases.  I discuss here an emerging sign language which I and my team (Sandler et al., 2005; Meir et al., 2017) have been studying for over 20 years, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. In that period of time, we have observed significant cultural changes that have impacted the community and changed in interesting ways how the village sign language is currently used, compared to when we first began our project there. Though more of the younger generation signers are bilingual in ABSL and Israeli Sign Language, the village sign language persists, especially among hearing signers. Central Taurus Sign Language (Ergin et al., 2021) is a village sign language with different community characteristics than Al-Sayyid. There, deafness is not concentrated in a single village, but to a network of villages throughout the region. There, the distribution of deaf people and signing follows a different pattern. Additionally, the newer work is showing that linguistic analysis can be further confirmed using other tools such as genetic analysis of deafness and computational modeling of community change and transmission, among others. Importantly, the field of sign language studies is turning to a broader and richer understanding of not just human languages, but multimodality in human languages - across speakers and signers. 

This talk will be taking place online using Zoom.  Please contact the event organiser to be sent the Zoom joining instructions.