Language Contact of Spoken and Signed Languages

The study of sociolinguistics focuses on the interaction of social and linguistic variables, and how they evolve in a specific setting. Social variables include age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and region, whereas linguistic variables include sound, handshapes, and syntactic structure. These factors intersect at the level of interaction between a deaf individual and a hearing individual, or even among two deaf individuals from different regions. The presence of both internal (handshapes) and external variables (age or ethnicity) is what sets the sociolinguistics of sign language apart from that of spoken languages. It has been observed that, just as expression of the same language differs regionally in the same country, so too does it differ among signers of a specific sign language. Contact sign language is especially susceptible to this variation because it arises from the contact of a given sign language and an oral language, though variation can also be observed between two different sign languages.

This language contact is common in the majority of Deaf communities, which are usually nested within hearing communities. This is further affected by the interaction of hearing parents and their deaf children because sign language is considered a second language for the parents and the mixing of the two language types results in unique variants of contact sign language. Across a community with deaf and hearing individuals, there will be a continuum of variants in communication. Within this continuum of variants are influences brought about from interactions of individuals of varying ages, gender, and socioeconomic status.