Laura M. Ahearn - Living Language

Myth #4 – There are no distinctive social or cultural practices associated with speaking particular sign languages . Because 90% of deaf people are born to hearing parents, they generally learn sign language in school settings. Within these speech communities, distinctive social and cultural practices have sprung up. Some ASL users, for example, prefer to capitalize the word “Deaf” and refer proudly to “Deaf culture” as a distinctive way of life that is complete with poetry, theater, distinctive expressions and interactional practices, etc. (In this case, we could say that the capital “D” indexes a cultural identity.) The controversy between individuals who advocate operating on deaf children to insert cochlear implants to improve their hearing enough to be able to lip read and individuals who do not support cochlear implants is at least as much about culture as it is about language.

A great deal can be learned about the human capacity for language in general and about specific communities of language users by studying sign languages. New sign languages continue to emerge, either in the context of deaf communities such as schools, as in the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language (Coppola 2002; Coppola and Senghas 2010; Senghas 2003), or in the context of families or communities where a large number of people are deaf for genetic reasons. The Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language is such a “village sign language” (Sandler et al. 2014). These new sign languages enable researchers to study how children acquire language, whether signed or spoken, and produce insights into interactions between deaf and hearing people, as well as into multimodal discourse more generally.

There are many other modalities through which meaning can be conveyed and co-constructed; it is impossible to describe all of them. One major one – writing, including computer-mediated communication and other forms of literacy – will be the focus of a later chapter. In the final section of this chapter, therefore, let me just mention a few more of the semiotic modalities that linguistic anthropologists study.

Poetry, both in the formal sense of poems written by poets, and in the Jakobsonian sense of the poetic potential of all utterances, deserves more attention than it usually receives from scholars. Arguments, marketing slogans, and even everyday remarks may contain poetic features such as alliteration, parallelism, rhythm, prosody, and the like, which can make them more or less effective or memorable. Linguistic anthropologists such as Dell Hymes, Paul Friedrich, Dennis Tedlock, Anthony Webster, and other contemporary researchers have shed light on the underlying poetic features of all discourse in a field called ethnopoetics (cf. Kataoka 2012). Webster (2009, 2015), for example, explores the politics and sentiments behind the language choices that young Navajos make and the role that poetry plays in these decisions, looking particularly closely at how individuals invest languages with what Sapir (1921:40) called “feeling-tones.” Webster’s research reveals the microprocesses of language ideologies at work, demonstrating how “intimate grammars” and emotions cause linguistic forms to “come to be icons of identity – icons that are deeply felt, but that can be evaluated negatively by outsiders” (Webster 2010:187; cf. Povinelli 2006).

Another semiotic modality that is available to most human speakers is the whistle. In some environments, such as rain forests, or mountainous regions with dense vegetation, the local language is converted into a whistled form of communication. Unlike the sign languages mentioned earlier, whistled languages are based directly on spoken languages but usually cannot convey the full range of meanings of those spoken languages. Still, whistled languages (or “whistled speech”) can communicate a fairly wide range of information. Like many sign languages, however, many whistled languages, such as Silbo Gomero, a whistle language used in the Canary Islands, Spain, and the Sochiapam Chinantec whistled language of Oaxaca, Mexico, are endangered because very few young people are learning how to use them. Some scholars (e.g., Meyer 2015 and Sicoli 2012) are attempting to document these languages through scholarly articles and popular videos (e.g., “Speaking in Whistles: The Whistled Language of Oaxaca, Mexico”2015 and Sicoli 2012) are attempting to document these languages through scholarly articles and popular videos (e.g., “Speaking in Whistles: The Whistled Language of Oaxaca, Mexico” 5) before they disappear so that we – and the communities that use these languages – can learn about and potentially revitalize this fascinating mode of communication.

Like whistling, song can either accompany or replace speech, and it is also related in interesting ways to poetry and performance, which we will discuss at greater length in Chapter 9. Song is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is important to note that musical modalities – everything from humming to beating out messages on the drums to playing instruments in a jazz band – are all semiotic modalities that deserve close analysis alongside talk, gesture, and other embodied communication. Oxbury, for example, analyzed a conversation among three sisters in which they broke into song periodically (Oxbury 2020), showing how the singing promotes solidarity and restores affiliation among the sisters at moments of trouble. And Harkness (2014) studied the relationship between voice, body, religion, and identity through participant observation in a Korean church choir (2014). In addition, from the perspective of another discipline, ethnomusicology is a field of study that draws upon and contributes to linguistic anthropology in fascinating ways, and vice versa (e.g., Black 2008; Duranti and Burrell 2004; Faudree 2013; Feld and Fox 1994; Samuels 2006).

Illustrations and images constitute yet another semiotic modality. Sometimes, illustrations supplement talk, as Green (2014) notes in her research on “sand stories,” which are narratives that are told by aboriginal people who live in Central Australia. As they tell their stories, they trace out images in the sand on the ground. In sand stories, Green writes, “Speech, sign, gesture, and drawing are deeply intertwined” (2014:3). Another example of a multimodal analysis of images, text, and speech is Feng’s (2019) study of the posters associated with Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” political slogan and campaign. Once we start paying attention, it becomes obvious that illustrations and all sorts of images, either created by the speakers themselves or simply referenced by them during the event, are woven into many interactions and are therefore an important semiotic modality. Here are just some examples:

Friends pass their phones back and forth to look at photos they took at a recent party.

A person sketches out a quick diagram on a piece of paper of the layout of rooms in a house.

Co-workers huddle together around a computer as they try to create an effective infographic for the data that their research group has produced.

A young child draws a picture of herself with curly hair as she signs her name on a birthday card for her grandmother.

Staff members at Studio Ghibli, an animation film studio in Tokyo, share drafts of a storyboard for their new anime.

We will be discussing literacy practices in much greater depth in Chapter 7, so for now it is sufficient merely to flag the presence of illustrations and other sorts of images as a modality that should not be overlooked when analyzing interactions.

Oftentimes, the very mode through which one chooses to communicate conveys a message in and of itself. Ilana Gershon (2010) discovered this in her study of the different ways that people use various kinds of social media to break up romantic relationships. If one’s boyfriend texts, “It’s over,” the modality of text messaging sends a very different message right from the start compared to the same words communicated over the phone or in person (or Facebook, e-mail, or some other form of writing) – or the lack of any words at all, which is what happens with ghosting when a person simply drops out of touch. Gershon uses the term media ideologies to talk about these differences – but we could also simply view the ideas that people have about various semiotic modalities as forms of language ideologies (cf. Gershon and Manning 2014).