Sign Language: Central America

Enduring Indigenous Contrasts

Excluding homesigns and sign-pidgins, at least six sign languages used in Central America and Mexico are Indigenous, meaning developed by aboriginal peoples. The remoteness and dismissal of Indigenous communities makes the existence of others likely. Although a majority in Guatemala and the southernmost states of Mexico, Indigenous people constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the over 160,000,000 inhabitants of Mexico and Central America. Nonetheless, most of the population and territory has occupied or interacted for millennia with Mesoamerica, whether defined as a culture-area, a language-area, or a political-economic and religious “world system.”

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Map of Greater Central American Sign Languages

In pre-colonial Native civilizations across much of Mesoamerica, sign languages were likely not just primary languages for the deaf, but also prestigious alternate languages for the hearing, associated with nobles, elders, art, and rituals. Some of these languages (and local gesture systems) form an Indigenous Mesoamerican Sign Language Complex, also called Meemul Tziij [me:-múl zix], after a K’ichee’-Mayan term for Indigenous signing meaning “mute language(s)/word(s)/lore/truth.” Based on the current distribution of languages of the complex, Meemul Tziij (MTz) served as a lingua franca in multilingual areas, not unlike how North American tribal peoples historically used Plains Sign Talk (PST).

Although not all Meemul Tziij varieties are necessarily related, they share certain features, such as classificatory hand orientations, partially base-20 number systems, and diphrastic kennings. (The latter two are common in spoken Mesoamerican languages.) At least the MTz varieties of Yucatán, western Guatemala, and Chiapas constitute a single language family. Distribution of languages in this family and the larger complex, particular signs associated with ancient culture, Indigenous chronicles mentioning signing centuries before the Spanish invasion, and similarities between translatable gestures in ancient iconography and proto-signs reconstructed by comparing modern languages suggest that Mesoamerica may have some of the world’s oldest documentable sign languages or component gestures: at least 1.5 millennia old.

Nonetheless, most scholars suppose that Indigenous sign languages are similar because they are new, share typological features common to sign languages used for communication with the hearing, and employ pre-existing regional gestural conventions. These explanations fit Zinacantec Family Homesign (ZFHS), which emerged virtually under the observation of anthropologist John Haviland, after the birth in 1976 of the first of several deaf children—and one hearing, but initially mute child—in an extended family of Tzotzil [Page 794]Mayas in Chiapas, Mexico. Nonetheless, without an ancient language complex, how did so many pre-existing regional gestures maintain similarity across so wide an area for so long?

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