Sign language ideologies: Practices and politics

Abstract

While much research has taken place on language attitudes and ideologies regarding spoken languages, research that investigates sign language ideologies and names them as such is only just emerging. Actually, earlier work in Deaf Studies and sign language research uncovered the existence and power of language ideologies without explicitly using this term. However, it is only quite recently that scholars have begun to explicitly focus on sign language ideologies, conceptualized as such, as a field of study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first edited volume to do so. Influenced by our backgrounds in anthropology and applied linguistics, in this volume we bring together research that addresses sign language ideologies in practice. In other words, this book highlights the importance of examining language ideologies as they unfold on the ground, undergirded by the premise that what we think that language can do (ideology) is related to what we do with language (practice).1 All the chapters address the tangled confluence of sign language ideologies as they influence, manifest in, and are challenged by communicative practices. Contextual analysis shows that language ideologies are often situation-dependent and indeed often seemingly contradictory, varying across space and moments in time. Therefore, rather than only identifying language ideologies as they appear in metalinguistic discourses, the authors in this book analyse how everyday language practices implicitly or explicitly involve ideas about those practices and the other way around. We locate ideologies about sign languages and communicative practices, which may not be one and the same, in their contexts, situating them within social settings, institutions, and historical processes, and investigating how they are related to political-economic interests as well as affective and intersubjective dynamics. Sign languages are minority languages using the visual-kinesthetic and tactile-kinesthetic modalities. It is important to recognize both that the affordances of these modalities are different from those of the auditory-oral (spoken) modality, and that signers, like speakers, often make use of multilingual and multimodal