Volume 10, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Deaf and hearing signers’ multimodal and translingual practices Guest Editor: Annelies Kusters

This paper reports on data from the “cross-signing” strand of a research project on Sign Multilingualism. Cross-signing investigates the ad-hoc improvised conversations of small groups of deaf sign language users who do not have fluency in any shared language. Participants were filmed in pairs when they met for the very first time, and after a contact period of 4–6 weeks together as a group. The deaf signers involved in this study are from the UK, Jordan, Indonesia, Japan, India, and Nepal. All signers are highly fluent in their own sign language, with varying competence in a language of literacy from their home country, but minimal or no overlapping competence in International Sign, English, or any other shared language between them. The participants used a wide range of multilingual and multimodal communicative resources, including their own and invented signs, fingerspelling, pointing, mouthing, gesture/mime, and various representations of writing. The article considers quantitative data from signed interactions during a picture-based elicitation game. While the overall response times taken by participants for completing the elicitation game are reduced at the end of the contact period compared to the initial contact, differentiating factors are at work that lead to different degrees of response time reduction in the individual signers. As a step towards explaining these patterns, the article explores insights into factors that may inhibit or facilitate communication between cross-signers, such as extent of contact between signers, typological distance between sign languages, or the use of literacy. Moreover, the data suggest a cumulative impact of these factors.

This article looks at translanguaging practices in four Yucatec Maya communities with a high incidence of deafness in the peninsula of Yucatán, Mexico. Deaf and hearing community members draw from a broad spectrum of semiotic resources to interact with each other and with people from other villages in the region: they sign with different degrees of fluency, speak Yucatec Maya and/or Spanish, gesture, draw, point and incorporate objects in their physical surroundings. Human beings have a general tendency to communicate between and beyond different languages and modalities and to creatively adapt their semiotic repertoires to each other to negotiate meaning. On top of that, I show that sociolinguistic and cultural features of Yucatec Maya communities scaffold translanguaging practices. The rich inventory of conventional co-speech gestures of Yucatec Maya speakers, positive attitudes towards deafness and signed language and a critical amount of shared cultural knowledge facilitate communication between deaf and hearing and contribute to the emergence of similar sign languages in historically unrelated communities. The investigation of Yucatec Maya signing communities through a translanguaging lens allows us to critically deconstruct existing classifications of sign languages and varieties. Yucatec Maya Sign Languages are portrayed as a multi-layered network of different villages, families, generations and overlapping deaf and hearing spaces, where translanguaging takes place.

Deaf people in Cambodia are often represented in the media as lacking language but in reality, deaf people’s repertoires and communicative practices challenge essentialisms regarding modalities and conventional understandings of “language.” Drawing on fieldwork in Cambodia, this article examines how notions of an urban/rural dichotomy devalue the communicative practices of rural deaf people. These ideologies marginalize the creative deployment of various modalities by deaf people in everyday languaging that are not commonly indexed as parts of a linguistic repertoire. Communicative practices such as drawing a picture to communicate, gestures, the use of physical objects such as city maps are devalued because academics and lay people tend to have rigid conceptualizations of language. This article calls for closer attention to modalities such as gestures, the drawing of pictures and the use of physical objects in everyday languaging to interrogate how the “invention” of languages results in distinctions between groups and individuals, especially in terms of access to linguistic resources such as a national signed language and perceptions about the use of modalities other than signing or speaking. In NGO narratives, often echoed by deaf Cambodians themselves, deaf people acquire a signed language only after rural-urban migration, which misrepresents their communicative competencies and creative use of linguistic resources. In reality, deaf people’s linguistic repertoires are constantly expanding as they enter new spaces, resulting in the flexible accumulation of languaging practices and modalities.

This article is drawn from field observations of deaf-led Deafinitely Theatre as they produced The DREAM for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. Focusing on a goal of the company to ‘put BSL [British Sign Language] centre stage’, I examine the ways that different languages and modes (including signs, speech, gestures, text, music) co-existed in the same space in spontaneous, unexpected, and hybridised ways. I suggest that the carefully chosen arrangements of the languages employed in the production exerted particular messages that went beyond BSL translations of Shakespeare, establishing clear articulations of the artists’ understandings of the positions that signed and spoken languages hold in day-to-day British life. The aim of this article is to disentangle the translingual, multimodal imperatives born within ‘deaf-led’ theatre, where deaf people and sign language are maintained as key grounding forces. Of interest is both language choices utilised in praxis, as well as how these decisions prompted debates between signers and non-signers, triggering reconsideration of preconceived notions of what ‘being deaf’ means. In re-presenting for an audience different people’s translingual and multimodal resources and experiences, I argue that these artists intentionally harnessed a form of conscious translanguaging to advance both practical and political outcomes.