Plains Indian Sign Language

Plains Indian Sign Language
HAND TALK
Native to USA and Canada
Native speakers
 Some middle-aged or older deaf people  (no date)[1]
Some mostly elderly hearing people as L2
Language codes
ISO 639-3 psd
Glottolog plai1235[2]

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.

History

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.[3] 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.[4] By the 1960s, there remained a “very small percentage of this number”.[4] There are few PISL signers today.[5]

William Philo 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, is a comprehensive lexicon of signs, with accompanying insights into Indian culture and history. It remains in print.

Geography

Sign language use has been documented across speakers of at least 37 oral languages in twelve families,[6] spread across an area of over 1 million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers).[7] 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.

Navajo Sign Language
Native to USA
Native speakers
 one clan  (1992)[8]
(deaf and hearing members)
Plains Indian Sign Language
  • Navajo Sign Language
Language codes
ISO 639-3 None (mis)
Glottolog None

Supalla reports a clan of Navajos that has several non-ASL-speaking deaf members; both deaf and hearing use a sign language that Supalla says is related to "Old Indian Sign Language".[8]

Phonology

There are four basic parameters of PISL sign: the location of the hand, its movement, shape, and orientation:[9]

There may be other parameters, such as facial features. However, these function like suprasegmentals, and the four parameters listed above are the crucial ones.[10]

Although the parameters of sign are listed separately below, in actuality they co-occur with the other parameters to make a single sign.[10] It is not clear how many of the differences were distinctive (phonemic).

Handshape

The Bureau of American Ethnology published a glossary of PISL signs that illustrate the handshapes involved.[14] They assigned them alphabetic letters.

Location

PISL uses the following locations. The various neutral spaces are the most common places for signs to occur.[11]

Orientation

These are the directions towards which the palm would face.[11]

Movement

The movements below are found in PISL. They may be repeated in certain situations.[11]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Plains Indian Sign Language at Ethnologue (17th ed., 2013)
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Plains Indian Sign Language". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. ↑ Wurtzburg, Susan, and Campbell, Lyle. North American Indian Sign Language: Evidence for its Existence before European Contact. International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 153-167.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Tomkins, William. Indian sign language. [Republication of "Universal Indian Sign Language of the Plains Indians of North America" 5th ed. 1931]. New York : Dover Publications 1969. (p. 7)
  5. ↑ Ethnologue report for Plain Indian Sign Language
  6. ↑ Davis, Jeffrey. 2006. “A historical linguistic account of sign language among North American Indian groups.” In Multilingualism and Sign Languages: From the Great Plains to Australia; Sociolinguistics of the Deaf community, C. Lucas (ed.), Vol. 12, pp. 3–35. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press
  7. ↑ Hand Talk: American Indian Sign Language.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Samuel J. Supalla (1992) The Book of Name Signs, p. 22
  9. ↑ Bergmann et al,2007, pp. 79-86
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 Bergmann et al,2007
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 Cody,1970
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Davis,2010
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Tomkins,1969
  14. ↑ Bureau of American ethnology,1881

Further reading

External links