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We turn now to a different type of multimodal communication, sign languages. This fascinating topic reinforces many of the concepts we have discussed in the book thus far. Unfortunately, misconceptions and negative language ideologies regarding sign languages abound, so it is necessary to debunk some common myths that people often hold about these languages (cf. LeMaster and Monaghan 2004).

Myth #1 – Sign languages are not “real” languages but instead are pidgin forms of communication with no grammar of their own. William Stokoe and other researchers have convincingly put this myth to rest. Sign languages have all the components we mentioned in Chapter 1 in the section, “So, What Do You Need to Know in Order to ‘Know’ a Language?” Also, sign languages do not consist merely of finger-spelling or of crude iconic gestures that resemble that which is being described. In the case of American Sign Language (ASL), in the place of phonemes (bits of sound that make a difference in meaning), users draw upon these five parameters involving gesture and other nonverbal modalities:

 Handshape

 Location of the hand relative to the body

 Movement of the hand (or lack thereof)

 Palm orientation (up or down)

 Non-manual markers, such as facial expressions. Here we see that the whole body is important for signers, not just the hands. ASL is truly a multimodal form of expression.

A shift in any one of these parameters can change the meaning of a sign in subtle or dramatic ways. All full-fledged sign languages are just as complex grammatically as spoken languages and just as capable (or incapable) of expressing anything a user wishes to convey. The only sign languages that are exceptions to this rule are the few signing modalities that are used by hearing people under special circumstances, such as Walpiri women’s signing, which they use when they are mourning (Haviland 2004:212; Kendon 1988) or Plains Standard Sign Language, which is a set of signing practices in decline but still used by some Native American groups such as the Nakota, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho (Farnell 1995). These are rich linguistic practices, but unlike ASL and other sign languages, most are not equipped with a comprehensive set of syntactic and semantic features.

Myth #2 – Sign Languages are basically iconic; that is, they are made up of gestures that look like what they are representing. While some signs have iconic elements, they are also combined with conventional (or symbolic) aspects – just like spoken languages, which have iconic signs in the form of onomatopoeic words such as “choo choo” or “cockadoodledoo” that are conventionally understood within particular speech communities. (In Nepal, for example, roosters say “kukhurikwa-” instead of “cockadoodledoo.”) Now that people generally do not view signers anymore as simply “painting pictures in the air” but rather as expressing themselves via a fully formed human language, more scholars are beginning to study the complex types of iconicity and multimodality found in sign languages (e.g., Cates et al. 2013). This kind of research has the potential to teach us a lot, not just about sign languages but about linguistic interactions in general.

Myth #3 – Sign language is universally shared by all deaf people in the world. This is simply untrue. Many deaf people do not use any sign language at all, either from choice or from lack of access. Ethnologue.com lists 144 deaf sign languages in the world as of February 2020, but these are only the ones that have been documented by scholars, and many of these are endangered (e.g., Nonaka 2014). It is estimated that there are several hundred sign languages in total, and there are most likely many more registers or dialects, such as Black ASL (The Language and Life Project 2020). While the domain of a sign language will often coincide with a particular spoken language or nation, there need not be any linguistic relationship between the sign language and a geographical area’s spoken language. For example, ASL is much closer linguistically to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language because of the history of how it was developed – and it is very different grammatically from spoken English. As another example, in Nepal, there is one national sign language and at least three “village” sign languages (cf. Hoffman-Dilloway 2008).

Myth #4 – There are no distinctive social or cultural practices associated with speaking particular sign languages. Because 90% of deaf people are born to hearing parents, they generally learn sign language in school settings. Within these speech communities, distinctive social and cultural practices have sprung up. Some ASL users, for example, prefer to capitalize the word “Deaf” and refer proudly to “Deaf culture” as a distinctive way of life that is complete with poetry, theater, distinctive expressions and interactional practices, etc. (In this case, we could say that the capital “D” indexes a cultural identity.) The controversy between individuals who advocate operating on deaf children to insert cochlear implants to improve their hearing enough to be able to lip read and individuals who do not support cochlear implants is at least as much about culture as it is about language.

A great deal can be learned about the human capacity for language in general and about specific communities of language users by studying sign languages. New sign languages continue to emerge, either in the context of deaf communities such as schools, as in the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language (Coppola 2002; Coppola and Senghas 2010; Senghas 2003), or in the context of families or communities where a large number of people are deaf for genetic reasons. The Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language is such a “village sign language” (Sandler et al. 2014). These new sign languages enable researchers to study how children acquire language, whether signed or spoken, and produce insights into interactions between deaf and hearing people, as well as into multimodal discourse more generally.