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Programme: accepted abstracts

Search for abstracts --- authors title abstract

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Abstract ID: 1104

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Sign language diversity in Indonesian deaf communities

Authors: Palfreyman, Nick
Submitted by: Palfreyman, Nick (University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom)

There are over 700 spoken languages in Indonesia – but are there as many signed languages?

Indonesia is a vast archipelago with a large population (over 237 million) and hundreds of spoken languages (Gordon, 2005: 391). Communities of deaf sign language users are spread over a wide geographical area spanning 5,000km. Most of these communities are urban, although an isolated sign language used by a village community has been discovered in Bali (Marsaja, 2008; de Vos, 2012). There has been no robust linguistic research into urban sign language varieties in Indonesia to date, and the linguistic diversity within and between these varieties has not yet been documented.

Like spoken languages, sign languages do not always follow national boundaries, and tend to exhibit considerable variation (Lucas, 2006). In the past, at least, there has been little regular contact between users of different urban sign language varieties in Indonesia. It is therefore reasonable to hypothesise that there is both lexical and morphosyntactic variation in Indonesian sign language varieties. In this presentation, I will provide a contrastive analysis of spontaneous sign language use within two urban deaf communities in order to examine the degree and nature of linguistic variation.

Spontaneous and elicited linguistic and sociolinguistic data have been collected from over 100 sign language users in the urban deaf communities of Solo (Central Java), and Makassar (Sulawesi). A notable degree of lexical variation has been found between and within the two varieties, in semantic domains such as number, kinship, and calendar terms. However, there are also striking similarities in the morphology and syntax of each variety, including a cross-linguistically unusual distribution of functions among manual and non-manual articulators. I will present examples from my data to illustrate these points, which include the perfective (SUDAH), and categories of negation, such as negative suppletion and non-manual marking. I will also discuss some of the socio-historical links between different urban deaf communities that may help to explain these findings.

To conclude, I will touch upon some of the attitudes towards language that have been expressed by members of the deaf community in Indonesia, which have implications for the interesting question of how many sign languages there are in Indonesia.

 

References

De Vos, C., 2012. Sign-Spatiality in Kata Kolok: how a village sign language of Bali inscribes its signing space. PhD thesis, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Gordon, R.G. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Fifteenth edition. Dallas: SIL International.

Lucas, C., 2006, ‘Sign Language: Variation’. In K. Brown, Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, (second edition). Pp.354-8. Oxford: Elsevier.

Marsaja, I. G., 2008. Desa Kolok: A deaf village and its sign language in Bali, Indonesia. Nijmegen, Ishara Press.