Diachronica - Volume 41, Issue 2, 2024

In this article, I look at the evolution of Polish Sign Language by closely analyzing the sign słodki ‘sweet’ at all of the stages of its development known to us. By closing in on just one sign we can see that the evolution of a sign is a very complex process. The sign słodki ‘sweet’ has gradually lost its iconic character over time. This is primarily due to linguistic factors, while societal factors have also impacted the sign’s transparency. Although at its inception słodki ‘sweet’ might have been considered iconic and its meaning transparent, today the sign’s motivation would be unclear to people seeing it for the first time, including to native Polish Sign Language users. The sign has undergone many different processes, such as assimilation, channel clearing, reduction and analogy. These processes are discussed in the article in depth; along with a change in society, they have resulted in the etymology of the sign being unknown to users of Polish Sign Language.

This study traces the development of discrete, combinatorial structure in Zinacantec Family Homesign (‘Z Sign’), a sign language developed since the 1970s by several deaf siblings in Mexico (Haviland 2020b), focusing on the expression of motion. The results reveal that the first signer, who generated a homesign system without access to language models, represents motion events holistically. Later-born signers, who acquired this homesign system from infancy, distribute the components of motion events over sequences of discrete signs. Furthermore, later-born signers exhibit greater regularity of form-meaning mappings and increased articulatory efficiency. Importantly, these changes occur abruptly between the first- and second-born signers, rather than incrementally across signers. This study extends previous findings for Nicaraguan Sign Language (Senghas et al. 2004) to a social group of a much smaller scale, suggesting that the parallel processes of cultural transmission and language acquisition drive language emergence, regardless of community size.

Sign languages seem not to be amenable to traditional historical reconstruction via the comparative method, making it difficult to replicate the successes achieved in the diachronic study of spoken languages. We propose to alleviate this difficulty with an alternative approach that draws upon nonarbitrariness and biomechanics, especially the drive for reducing articulatory effort. We offer a demonstration of this approach, which can add confirmation to known relationships between sign languages and new evidence in support of suspected relationships, helping to fill in a methodological gap in the diachronic study of sign languages.

Studies of diachronic change in sign languages are only available for a small number of sign languages, in part due to the scarcity of historical resources for sign languages. This article presents the first study of diachronic change in Nederlandse Gebarentaal ‘Dutch Sign Language’ (NGT) and Vlaamse Gebarentaal ‘Flemish Sign Language’ (VGT). It looks at the impact of an artificial sign system on the lexicons of the Gestel variant of NGT and the Limburg variant of VGT. The recovery of two 19th century manuscripts describing 3,000 signs and 7,000 signs of this system respectively enables us to compare this artificial system with published data for NGT and VGT from the 1950s and the present.

We focus on the resilience of an artificial distinction that is not considered distinctive in other natural sign languages, i.e., an absolute left/right distinction for gender marking in kinship terms. The results show that the NGT and VGT variants have partially changed or replaced all the artificial signs, except UNCLE/AUNT, NEPHEW/NIECE in NGT and PARENTS in VGT. The partial changes shed light on the mechanisms through which artificial elements are nativized to fit the phonological system of these sign languages. The changes observed in the left/right paradigm have implications for our understanding of the distribution of laterality in sign language phonology in general.

Finally, the impact of the highly restricted access to language models that were part of the strict oralist approaches in these school, and the consequent impoverished language input on diachronic change and lexical innovation are discussed.