**6. Conclusions**

This paper has considered the vulnerability of emerging sign languages in terms of their sociolinguistic contexts and how this might impact their endangerment and continuity. We focused on the case of the deaf community in Kufr Qassem in which the younger generation are now exposed to two sign languages: a local village sign language, KQSL, and a national deaf community sign language, ISL. We see that some emerging sign languages, such as KQSL, face the threat of language shift when they socially and linguistically merge with the wider deaf community in Israel. Some of the sociolinguistic characteristics of some emerging sign languages, like village sign languages,—such as smaller community size and lack of institutional support—are the very factors that lead to its vulnerability when in contact with a national sign language. At the same time, this fate is not inevitable for all emerging sign languages. Without language contact, many emerging sign languages may not necessarily be at risk.

The focus on emerging sign languages has typically been on the "emerging" element— based on the fact that young languages may shed light on what the language once looked like and under what conditions they were able to develop and thrive. However, perhaps now is the time to focus on the "sign languages" themselves by documenting them before it is too late—as Nonaka (2004, p. 759) suggests: *"many sign languages are dying out or are on the verge of disappearing without ever being recorded or described—a fact that underscores the urgency of remembering these forgotten endangered languages"*.

The irony is that when linguists learn of an emerging sign language, this might be because it is no longer as isolated as it once was. Thus, when linguists begin conducting studies on these "new" languages it might already be too late. This raises an important question: Should linguists intervene in a situation such as this? Many linguists prefer to document and not to intervene (Flores Farfan and Ramallo 2010) and to leave intervention to the community itself (Braithwaite 2020). There is still much more work to be conducted on emerging sign languages, and the findings from this paper simply emphasize the urgency of this.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, M.J. and R.S.; methodology, M.J. and R.S.; formal analysis, M.J.; investigation, M.J.; resources, R.S.; data curation, R.S.; writing—original draft preparation, R.S.; writing—review and editing, M.J. and R.S.; visualization, M.J.; supervision, R.S.; funding acquisition, R.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the Israeli Science Foundation gran<sup>t</sup> number [2057/20].

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Ethics Committee of Bar-Ilan University (protocol code 182021 and 08.11.2020).

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to ethical and privacy reasons.

**Acknowledgments:** We wish to thank Rawan Sarsour and Tayyeb Badawi for their help with recruitment and running the tasks, in addition to their feedback on certain issues in the data. We also would like to thank Wehda Sarsour, the founder and current manager of the deaf club in Kufr Qassem who was very generous and opened the doors of the deaf club for us during the data collection process. We are grateful to Dalal Sarsour and Ora Ohanin who acted as language consultants from the KQSL and the ISL community, respectively. We thank Roni Beit-Hallahmi who helped, as a fluent ISL signer, to provide different variations of ISL signs as well as information about language use in the

general Israeli deaf community. Lastly, we wish to thank the deaf community in Kufr Qassem and the participants without whom this study would have never been possible.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
