Cataloguing sign languages

While we were in Malaysia, we were involved in a discussion about how best to organize sign languages in the Ethnologue, a massive catalogue of the languages of the world. Check it out at: www.ethnologue.com.

Sign languages weren't really accepted as real languages until the 1960s through the work of William Stokoe at Gallaudet University. Today, we find ourselves still explaining why sign languages are distinct from the spoken languages around them to many people that we meet. We were included in the discussion because of our last 4 years experience - we have been making decisions and recommendations for language development work based on a set of criteria that we believe can identify where distinct projects are needed - where distinct sign languages and deaf communities are located. The discussion centered around how we can merge or adapt the criteria that we have chosen, or brainstorm new ways of categorizing sign languages, that would work with the criteria that is used for spoken languages in the Ethnologue to create a set of guidelines for how to include and organize the sign languages of the world.

It was a good discussion - identifying language boundaries is something that the field of linguistics has not come up with a good single method for because of all of the linguistic and social factors involved. Just think: do you always understand the English spoken in England? In Australia? In India? When you get transferred to the other side of the world on a phone call - do you always understand their "English"? Yet we call it the same language. In contrast, two people groups may be able to understand each other because they live just across national borders, but because they consider themselves so distinct culturally they don't feel they share the same language, have different names for their languages, and wouldn't use the same language materials. Determining language boundaries can be messy.

At any rate, the discussion we were involved in ended in the recommendation that we write a series of papers about what we've found and done (more writing!). One of the amazing things about sign languages is that, relatively speaking to spoken languages which have been around hundreds or thousands of years, sign languages have relatively short histories and many of them have developed in the time that older generations of deaf people have living memory of the entire history of their language! Because of this, learning the history of a deaf community and their language is an important part of our work that allows us to draw (or rule out) ties and shared relationship with other sign languages - whether next door geographically or far away because of international involvement.

Interested in learning more about the Ethnologue and some of the politics surrounding it? Check out this article, published by The Economist: "God-loving Linguists".

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/laura-spinney/god-loving-linguists