*Editorial* **Emerging Sign Languages**

**Wendy Sandler 1,\*, Carol Padden 2 and Mark Aronoff 3**


The emergence of sign language is of special interest because sign languages are the only human languages that can emerge de novo at any time. This means that the path they take is a good source of information about the emergence of language in human populations. There are probably hundreds of emerging sign languages around the world; however, we do not have enough information about them all, and this hampers the formation of robust generalizations. Linguists rarely have the chance to catch emerging sign languages in the act of being born, and small emerging sign languages are often quickly subsumed by larger national sign languages, which are used in education and formal interpreting.

This Special Issue presents rare data and analyses about eleven different emerging sign languages around the world. The articles deal with the following key topics of language emergence, with some overlap: (1) the relationship between language and culture of the larger society, including both ambient manual gestures and facial expressions; (2) the role of iconicity in the emergence of sign language; (3) the relationship between shared context in a small signing community and the degree of variation in the vocabulary; and (4) the vulnerability of budding sign languages. Spoken creole languages are also young, but are different from emerging sign languages, in that the speakers of pidgins from which creoles are assumed to have descended already had native languages. Topic number (5) in this collection is a comparison of features of creoles and of emerging sign languages.

#### **1. The Influence of Culture on Language Emergence**

**Yasamin Motamedi**, **Kathryn Montemurro**, **Natasha Abner**, **Molly Flaherty**, **Simon Kirby**, and **Susan Goldin-Meadow** explored the basis of the action–object distinction in natural language, in the laboratory rather than in the field. Using the *silent gesture paradigm* with hearing non-signers, they ask whether the dyads of gesturers can innovate distinctions between objects and actions in an experimental communication task. They presented dyads with video scenes showing target objects being used by an actor in either typical or atypical contexts. The most significant distinctions found in the study were between typical and atypical situations. An example of a typical context would be using a camera to take a photograph; an atypical context would be using a camera to dig in the soil. In contrast to the typical context, where the object can be incorporated into the action (holding the hands in the shape of a camera as if to take a picture), an atypical context compels the participant to explicitly distinguish between an object and its action. The authors find that, despite having little experience in using gestures for a task such as this, dyads are more likely to gesture the object by itself, followed by a gesture for the action. Coders recorded whether the participants' used the base hand, whether the location of the gesture was on the body or in neutral space, the size of the gesture, and whether the gesture had repetitions in movement. Dyads formed gestural distinctions between objects and actions in their use of the base hand and with repetitions, but they did not consistently use locations on or around the body, nor did they vary the size of the gesture. The laboratoryproduced forms show important similarities with the kinds of noun–verb distinctions described in naturally emerging languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language (Abner

**Citation:** Sandler, Wendy, Carol Padden, and Mark Aronoff. 2022. Emerging Sign Languages. *Languages* 7: 284. https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages7040284

Received: 19 October 2022 Accepted: 2 November 2022 Published: 7 November 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

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et al. 2019). This indicates that distinguishing between objects and actions is an essential feature of human communication (Supalla and Newport 1978), as has been shown for two emerging sign languages (Tkachman and Sandler 2013), and likely provides a basis for the emergence of nouns and verbs in nascent sign languages in general. Motamedi et al. also found convergence on forms within dyads (irrespective of iconicity), implicating cultural transmission as a relevant factor in the emergence of language.

**Rabia Ergin's** study contributes to a growing body of research studying how signers select and regularize gestural strategies for the purpose of building linguistic structure. Her field study also dealt with objects and actions, focusing on whether objects and actions are consistently differentiated in an emerging sign language used in Turkey. Five older and five younger Central Taurus Sign Language (CTSL) signers were shown two tasks: the first involved naming a photograph of an object in isolation; the second involved identifying the same object as used in an action by an actor. Ergin found that both cohorts preferred first depicting an action associated with the object, then describing the form and shape of the object. Older signers were more likely to use single signs or shorter strings when naming an object in isolation, compared with younger signers who used longer sign combinations and compounds in their responses.

When viewing a short video of an actor using objects in several atypical actions, such as dropping a pair of sunglasses, a hat, or a jacket (as opposed to putting them on), both cohorts chose one of two strategies. Either they ignored the actions in the array and referred only to the object, using object-based strategies such as shape and size, or they used object and action strategies together simultaneously. Ergin describes iconic strategies for actions and objects that become more consistently differentiated in signers of this emerging sign language. The patterning of responses within each of the signing cohorts shows not only that their strategies are shaped and regularized, but that their responses are consistent within their cohorts, a finding which is compatible with the cultural transmission factor supported by Motamedi et al., described above. Additionally, the younger cohort's preference for longer strings in their responses suggested to Ergin that they are more aware of the communicative pressures in the task, and acted to identify the target object separately from the other potentially confusing choices.

**John B. Haviland** presents a close analysis of the emergence of a grammatical marker in the language of a young, second-generation signer of a family sign language (which he dubbed Z), whose first cohort consisted of three deaf siblings, a hearing sibling, and a hearing niece. This child was the hearing son of the first deaf signer of Z. Haviland follows in detail an original conventionalized gestural emblem requesting attention (COME), which is ubiquitous among speakers of the spoken Tzotzil Mayan language of the surrounding community. The sign is first adopted in Z in the form of a more brief sign (HEY1), which calls for an interlocutor's visual attention. HEY1, in turn, is reduced in Z to HEY2, which signals that a signer is about to start a new signed utterance or to transition to a new conversational topic, when they have already secured their interlocutors' visual attention.

The bulk of the article is devoted to showing how Victor, the younges<sup>t</sup> signer of Z, beginning at 11 months, gradually acquires all three of these signs in order, while simultaneously acquiring both Z and Tzotsil. Victor's acquisition of pragmatic signs in Z, such as the one tracked in this study, demonstrates how the grammar of a language, including an emergen<sup>t</sup> sign language, is built upon the practices of a language community and the basic parameters of local social life.

**Olivier Le Guen** tackles a topic that is much-studied and somewhat controversial in established sign languages: verb agreement. His study is based on his research on the emerging Yucatan Maya Sign Language. Agreement consists of moving the hands from a spatial locus established for the subject to that established for the object of a verbal sign. Early research suggested that this system takes time to develop in young sign languages, both in the Al-Sayyid Bedouin village sign language and even in the young national deaf community sign language, Israeli Sign Language (e.g., Padden et al. 2010). In contrast, Le Guen's study shows that the use of space in verb agreemen<sup>t</sup> does emerge early in

Yucatan Maya Sign Language; he attributes this to the gestures of the ambient culture described in his own earlier work. The article links cultural gestural patterns to sign language grammatical rules, and is commensurate with the view that culture contributes to the structure and emergence of language, a view put forth in the laboratory work of Smith and Kirby (2012), supported in Meir and Sandler (2020), and further supported by many articles in this Special Issue.

**Anne-Marie Kocab**, **Anne Senghas**, and **Jennie Pyers** turn to nonmanual signals. They ask whether Nicaraguan Sign Language (LSN) non-manual markers for WH-questions might have been based on the gestural and facial expression repertoire of hearing nonsigners in the same culture. It has been claimed in the past, but without the benefit of empirical diachronic data, that linguistic facial expressions in sign languages derive from expressions that occur in general culture (e.g., Janzen and Shaffer 2003). It has also been rigorously demonstrated that particular linguistic facial expressions and head positions and their scope take time to emerge in young Israeli Sign Language (Dachkovsky 2018). Kocab et al.'s study in this collection is the first to systematically compare wh-question facial expressions of deaf signers with those of hearing non-signers in the same culture, and to track this signal's emergence in a young sign language, LSN. Using data collected from the first cohort of signers of LSN (the first to attend a recently established school for deaf children in Managua), they examined how the non-manual forms of the first cohort of signers compare with those of hearing non-signers of a comparable age. They then compared the first cohort of signers with second and third cohorts to track whether there are systematic changes in their non-manual productions. They report that although there is similarity in the types of non-manual markers used by hearing non-signers and the first cohort of LSN signers, the second and third cohort of signers exhibit greater selectivity with respect to which markers are used most frequently and which are used less frequently. Second and third cohorts of signers use significantly more brow furrows in their questions than hearing non-signers, and they make less use of head tilts. Furthermore, the authors report that the duration of these markers is longer in the later cohorts, implicating the scope of linguistic constituents as a determining factor. Unlike facial expressions used by hearing gesturers, the nonmanual forms of later cohorts of LSN signers possibly exhibit a narrowing of expressive options as well as an increase in frequency and duration of these forms.

**Hannah Lutzenger**, **Roland Pfau**, and **Connie de Vos** discuss the transition from gesture to sign in the history of the marker for negation in Kata Kolok, a rural language isolate from Bali. After outlining the typology of negation in both signed and spoken languages, and discussing the sociolinguistic place of Kata Kolok and its users, the authors present the results of their study, with data garnered from signers from generations III to V of the community. They concentrate on the balance between manual and non-manual signs in the expression of negation, both in Kata Kolok and more broadly. Kata Kolok signers negate extensively with both manual and nonmanual markers; however, the language does not favor the use of one over the other, unlike most sign languages in which negation has been discussed to date.
