| Plains Indian Sign Language | |
|---|---|
| HAND TALK | |
| Signed in | USA and Canada |
| Native signers | Few (date missing) |
| Language family | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | psd |
The Plains Indian sign languages (PISL) are various manually coded languages used, or formerly used, by various Native Americans of the Great Plains of the United States of America and Canada. The best known is Plains Standard Sign Language, a contact language (international auxiliary language) used between these peoples.
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PISL's antecedents, if any, are unknown, due to lack of written records, but the earliest records of contact between Europeans and Native Americans of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the Europeans' arrival there.[1] These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541.
As a result of several factors, including the massive depopulation and the Americanization of Native North Americans, the number of PISL signers declined from European arrival onward. In 1885, it was estimated that there were over 110,000 “sign-talking Indians”, including Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa and Arapaho.[2] By the 1960s, there remained a “very small percentage of this number”.[2] There are few PISL signers today.[3]
W.P. Clark who served in the United States Army on the northern plains during the Indian Wars was the author of The Indian Sign Language, first published in 1885, The Indian Sign Language with Brief Explanatory Notes of the Gestures Taught Deaf-Mutes in Our Institutions and a Description of Some of the Peculiar Laws, Customs, Myths, Superstitions, Ways of Living, Codes of Peace and War Signs, remains in print.
Sign language use has been documented across speakers of at least 37 spoken languages in twelve families,[4] spread across an area of over 1 million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers).[5] In recent history, it was highly developed among the Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa, among others, and remains strong among the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho.
Each nation used a distinct manually coded language, as was the case in aboriginal Australia. In addition, there was a trade pidgin that may have never been extensively used, or was only used by a well-traveled elite. This contact language may be distinguished as Plains Standard SL, as opposed to the generic term Plains Indian SL for the various ethnic forms. These were reportedly not used by the deaf, who used home sign instead.
Signing may have started in the south, perhaps in northern Mexico or Texas, and only spread into the plains in recent times, though this suspicion may be an artifact of European observation. Sign, or at least contact sign, spread to the Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Caddo after their removal to Oklahoma. Via the Crow, it replaced the divergent Plateau Sign Language among the eastern nations that used it, the Coeur d’Alene, Sanpoil, Okanagan, Thompson, Lakes, Shuswap, and Coleville in British Columbia, with western nations shifting instead to Chinook Jargon.
The various nations with attested use, divided by language family, are:
A distinct form is also reported from the Wyandot of Ohio.
There is some debate as to whether Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) is actually a single language with various dialects or whether there are multiple languages. In "Hand Talk", Jeffrey Davis, author of “Hand Talk,” asserts that there is only one language, with dialectal variations. [6] PISL was formerly used as a "lingua franca" by the Native Americans of the Plains to communicate between tribes and also to communicate between members of the same tribe. It was and is used by both deaf and hearing individuals.[7] Thus, considering its status as a “lingua franca” it can be accepted that PISL is indeed a language.
It is commonly accepted amongst linguists who study sign language, though not widely known to the general public, that all signed languages have certain parameters that are used to define their most basic parts. [8] This may be compared to how spoken languages have certain parameters—place of articulation, manner, highness, frontness, etc.--to define their phones. [9] Signed language phones, as they are called, [10] are defined by the following parameters, as explained in “Language Files”:[11]
There are sometimes other considerations that can be added into signs. “Language Files” shows that these include things such as facial features and one-handedness versus two-handedness in signs. However, it is generally accepted that these function more a suprasegmentals, and that the four parameters listed above are the more crucial elements of various signs. [20]
One fundamental difference between spoken and signed languages is that while in spoken languages’ phones occur separately; occurring one after the other, signed languages phones all occur at the same time. [21] For example, if one makes a handshape, it will, by necessity, exist in a certain location, have a certain movement or lack thereof, and have a certain orientation. For this reason it must be understood that while the parameters of sign are listed separately below, they would always be found co-occurring with the other parameters to make up a single sign phone.[22]
In the early 1900s, information was provided by the Bureau of American Ethnology that gave the alphabet of PISL. [23] While there are more letters in the PISL alphabet, these letters are achieved by changing the orientation of the same handshape. [24] Thus, there are less hand shapes than there are letters in the PISL alphabet. In PISL, the following handshapes may be found. The letters in parentheses are the corresponding alphabet letters. The following descriptions are adapted from the descriptions in the report from the Bureau of American Ethnology. [25]
PISL uses the following locations. The various neutral spaces are the most common places for signs to occur. These were found in “Indian Talk” by Iron Eyes Cody. [27]
Sharing much in common with many of the world’s signed languages, the following orientations are used in PISL. These are the directions towards which the palm would face. They have also been found in “Indian Talk” by Iron Eyes Cody. [29] These are the basic orientations. The movement of a sign may carry it through other orientations, but these are a result of the movement, not a separate orientation.
The movements listed below constitute those that may be found in PISL. These also have been gathered from “Indian Talk” by Iron Eyes Cody. [31] Note that movements may be repeated in certain situations. [32]