1.3.1. Libras

Libras—an abbreviation of its Portuguese name, <sup>L</sup>íngua Brasileira de Sinais—is the official national sign language of Brazil, used in (but not limited to) institutions and urban centres across Brazil. Its establishment was associated with the foundation of the National Institute of Deaf Education (INES) in Rio de Janeiro in 1857. Since one of the original teachers at the institute was French, modern Libras has evolved from a mixture of French Sign Language and existing signs in use in the region (Xavier and Agrella 2015). In 2002, Libras was legally recognised as the language of many Brazilian deaf communities, reaffirming its cultural and linguistic importance as a natural language10. The legal recognition of Libras under the 'Libras Law' (as Federal Law 10.436 is known) and a resulting decree (5.626) has manifested basic deaf rights in Brazil, including rights to interpreters in official settings and the translation of official documents. In the wake of such legal recognition, Silva (2021) suggests we need to look anew at the sign languages of Brazil used outside of urban centres. Outside of legal protections and benefits, we have seen that their documentation paves the way for a richer and broader understanding of (sign) language typology (de Vos and Pfau 2015), phonology (see Sandler et al. 2011 for the emergence of), and syntax (Sandler et al. 2005 for word order; Meir 2010; Padden et al. 2010; Ergin et al. 2018 for argumen<sup>t</sup> structure). We compare Cena to Libras in the current study to control as many orthogonal variables as possible. Primarily, the comparison ensures that the repertoires of ambient gestures of the surrounding culture are closely matched. This is a known and significant influence on sign languages, as they absorb and reorganise gestures that are culturally specific even within the realms of classifiers (Nyst 2019). We know of at least one such borrowing in Cena, where the sign PAST/A-LONG-TIME is identical in form to a common Brazilian finger-snapping gesture relating to time passing. Therefore, although the desired comparison is primarily between a young emergen<sup>t</sup> language and an urban sign language with greater time depth, we aim to minimise confounds from distinct gestural influences by comparing Cena to the most culturally similar language that otherwise meets our criteria.

## 1.3.2. Cena

Silva (2021, p. 107) details studies that deal with at least 21 sign languages used by deaf communities in Brazil (see Fusellier-Souza 2004; Stoianov and Nevins 2017; and Godoy 2020 for examples of linguistic investigation). However, such studies are still preliminary and in need of richer linguistic description. Among these emerging sign languages used by isolated communities far from urban centres we find Cena, literally *scene*, the word used to refer to what signers recount with their hands as they sign and the term that has come to be used as a name for the language in its community. Cena is a sign language in its third generation used by deaf (and many hearing) inhabitants of Várzea Queimada, a community with a population of about 900. Várzea Queimada is located in the eastern part of Piauí, a mostly landlocked state of north-eastern Brazil. Cena, like other languages of its kind, has emerged within a context of a high rate of congenital deafness and is unrelated to the national sign language of its country. It is in the PhD thesis of Everton Pereira (2013)

that we find the first published mention of Cena11. From an anthropological perspective, he details the use of Cena as it interacts with aspects of daily life and society in Várzea Queimada: work, religious practices, family life, and local artisanal crafting. The majority of residents, deaf and hearing alike, subsist on agriculture, animal husbandry, local commerce, and governmen<sup>t</sup> benefits12. In claiming that many hearing people sign, and in drawing any parallels between the work-related livelihoods of deaf and hearing inhabitants of the community, it is important to be careful to not perpetuate idealistic notions of a 'deaf utopia' in villages such as Várzea Queimada, as warned by Kusters (2010). She explains the risk of flattening many nuanced asymmetries between the social, economic, educational, and professional realities of deaf and hearing people in such contexts by over-emphasising the integration of deaf community members relative to Western urban contexts. In Várzea Queimada, deaf access to education has historically been subpar or non-existent, and the community is not immune to negative attitudes towards deafness from within their ranks. Anthropological and linguistic work on Cena is undoubtedly in its infancy, but suffice it to say for now that the gap of social and economic stratification between deaf and hearing inhabitants of Várzea Queimada is far smaller than that of urban centres around Brazil, which is of course in no small part likely due to the upper limits of such stratification within the confines of the village.

There are 34 known deaf inhabitants as of 202113, most of whom use Cena as their primary language although there is variation in the exposure to and use of Libras, particularly with younger signers. Most deaf inhabitants are clustered in three villages, each a few kilometres apart. The first deaf woman in the community was born in 1949, and soon after another six deaf children were born into a different family. Cena is not a homesign system, but we hypothesise that like many similar languages, it likely started as one. As is common with sign languages of this sociocultural context (de Vos and Pfau 2015), an unknown number of hearing people in the community sign to varying degrees of competency. Many deaf adults have hearing children—known as CODAs (children of deaf adults)—who are proficient signers, and some hearing members of deaf individuals' families are competent signers. At the time of publication, the younges<sup>t</sup> deaf signer is 15, with no other known deaf children born in the community since. There is some use of Libras among younger signers since many temporarily attended schools in the community, where they had weekly classes in Libras. Younger signers also have access to the internet and numerous social networks to varying degrees, and signers of a variety of ages use lexical borrowings from Libras. Despite the increased and perhaps increasing presence of Libras in the community through education and the internet, age remains a determining factor; older signers do not, and have not historically, attended school and thus use of Libras among them is often minimal.

Whilst Pereira's thesis discusses matters of deaf social life and integration in detail, Almeida-Silva and Nevins (2020) provide the first linguistic overview of the language. Their data is comprised of 330 signs including nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and functional items. Pronominal markers rather expectedly use self-anchored pointing to mark first person, and pointing using real-world location to mark the second or third person of any present referent. In all existing data including that in the current study, no absent third-person pronouns have been observed. The authors also present evidence of adverbial modification (shown in Figure 7) in the use of facial expression and body movement to intensify manual signs, much like uses of similar non-manual features for intensification purposes in other urban sign languages, such as the 'ee' mouth gesture in BSL (Sutton-Spence and Woll 1999) and Auslan (Johnston and Schembri 2007), and the furrowed brows and hunching of the torso used in intensification in Libras (Xavier 2017). Concerning word order, there appears to be little overall convergence. Yet 'overall' may be the operative word in this case, as work on Central Taurus Sign Language (Ergin et al. 2018) and ABSL (Meir 2010) suggests consistency of word order in emerging sign languages can be dependent on syntactical properties of the verb events in question, as well as on signing cohort. Almeida-Silva and Nevins (2020) encountered various minimal

pairs such as the example shown in Figure 8, where one should note that the difference of left- and right-handedness between the signers is irrelevant to lexical contrast. As expected from languages that have emerged among low or unreliable rates of literacy, there is no manual alphabet nor any attested native alphabetised signs present thus far, though several signers know the Libras manual alphabet to varying extents—it is not uncommon for signers to use it for their own names or the names of others. Although there exist lexical borrowings from Libras, both the findings of Almeida-Silva and Nevins (2020) and data in the current study provide evidence for a vocabulary largely comprised of local Cena signs, including compounds unattested in Libras. Based on our observations over many field visits, signers are predominantly monolingual. This description is corroborated by self-reports from signers (Almeida-Silva, forthcoming), and by interviews with those who worked as teachers with the deaf members of the community, one going so far as to say Cena signers "reject" Libras (Franco 2022, p. 7).

**Figure 7.** A case of modification utilising the 'ee' mouth shape and body posture.

(**a**) (**b**) **Figure 8.** A minimal pair in Cena differing in handshape: (**a**) GOAT; (**b**) TO BETRAY.

This preliminary linguistic sketch of Cena found considerable robustness of various domains of the lexicon, notably food, animals, and religious terminology (which details the numerous saints and religious festivals observed by the mostly Catholic inhabitants of the community). Despite this, variation prevails. It is primarily along inter-familial and intergenerational lines where lexical variation is found, but phonetic variation is widespread

among signers. This comes as no surprise (cf. Israel and Sandler 2011 for ABSL). It is known that for language in general, degrees of social intimacy and shared communal knowledge has a bearing on the resulting types of linguistic structures (Wray and Grace 2007). The lives of the inhabitants of Várzea Queimada are highly intertwined. People spend a grea<sup>t</sup> deal of daily time in each other's company doing domestic or farm work. From this repeated interaction sprouts a high degree of knowledge and intimacy concerning the lives and families of others, shared reference points, events and practices of cultural importance, and a knowledge of the surrounding area. The communication patterns of Várzea Queimada would fall squarely into what Wray and Grace (2007) and Thurston (1989) call *esoteric*, inward-facing language use on topics of mutual familiarity among those who are known to each other. This shared knowledge and relative homogeneity is what enables languages in such communities to tolerate high rates of variation (Meir and Sandler 2019), and is primarily what motivates our Hypothesis 2, predicting greater variation in Cena.

## 1.3.3. Typological Considerations

Considering the above sociocultural and linguistic outline of Cena, we turn briefly to the issue of language typology. Typological classification is a useful exercise as it enables us to compare phenomena across languages of the same type. Of course, *type* can refer to many aspects of linguistic structure—tonal languages are a type, as well as those with or without agglutinative morphology. Given what is known about the effects of sociocultural and geographical context on linguistic structure in young sign languages, the existing literature has commonly sought to categorise them along these lines. Broadly speaking, two main categories appear in the literature following the distinction first made by Meir et al. (2010): *deaf community sign languages*, and what we will term *village sign languages* (although there is more debate around the labels for sign languages of this general kind). Deaf community sign languages are the result of a group of deaf people of varied backgrounds coming together for some (often institutional) purpose, and often coincide with the establishment of a deaf school. NSL is one often-cited example of a deaf community sign language (see Senghas 1995 and Kegl et al. 1999 for early work) as the establishment of the school that galvanised its development was relatively recent. The historical development of several national sign languages including ASL also meets the criteria for this label, though these are often referred to as *urban sign languages*.

It should already be clear that Cena is not a deaf community sign language. As it has emerged among its users of the same background within the community in which it is used, Cena does not meet this description. Concerning the second type, there are many overlapping terms, including *village sign language* (Zeshan 2011), *shared sign language* (Nyst 2012), *indigenous sign language* (Woodward 2000), and *micro-community sign language* (Schembri 2010), which generally overlap in their criteria of a high rate of congenital deafness and a geographically rural context. The label *shared sign language* foregrounds the tendency for a large number of hearing people in such communities to sign, with varying degrees of fluency and regularity. Similarly, the name *indigenous sign language* aims to highlight the origin of such languages as the same region or country as that in which they are used. All such features are true of Cena, meaning perhaps it is a question of what we to wish to foreground. For the current study, we follow Almeida-Silva and Nevins (2020) in using the label *emerging sign language* with the caveat that Cena does broadly fit the typical profile of a village sign language, since it is primarily the difference of time depth that is relevant for our aims. That is, we wish to compare Cena with a language in the same national and therefore to some degree cultural context, but one that has a stable and conventionalised lexicon and linguistic structure.

Whilst Almeida and Nevins provide an invaluable preliminary overview of the language, there is to date no mention of classifiers in any work on Cena. With the exception of Brentari et al. (2012)14, there is little in the existing literature on classifiers in young or emerging sign languages. Although not an emergen<sup>t</sup> language, in her description of Adamorobe Sign Language (a village sign language used in Ghana), Nyst (2007) details the

gestural and linguistic resources signers exploit for depiction of size and shape. Nyst's striking finding that Adamorobe Sign Language lacks entity classifiers highlights the importance of village sign language data in investigations of language typology and in questioning linguistic universals. Similarly, de Vos (2012) describes some classifier constructions in Kata Kolok—another non-emergen<sup>t</sup> village sign language (she posits that Kata Kolok is in its fifth generation) used on Bali, Indonesia. De Vos finds that entity classifiers in Kata Kolok exploit a more restricted set of handshapes than urban sign languages; instead of handshape, entity classifiers in Kata Kolok are primarily defined by different features of movement or orientation (cf. de Vos 2012, p. 101; Marsaja 2008). Again, her findings demonstrate that village sign languages can exhibit typologically unique or unusual properties in the realm of classifiers and the distribution of the features that comprise them15. The current study contributes another such investigation into classifiers in a young language, and the distribution of some elements that comprise them. It also provides the first English-language work on Cena, and the first comparative study of Cena with any other language.

#### **2. Materials and Methods**
