German Sign Language and
Communication of the Deaf
Photo: UHH/Denstorf
20 July 2022, by Pamela Sundhausen
Photo: IDGS
The last guest lecture of this summer semster took place on July 13th. The lecturer was the sociolinguist Nick Palfreyman from the University of Central Lancashire. He presented in BSL (with interpretation into English and DGS) about his field research on BISINDO, the Indonesian sign language.
Nick first presented the BISINDO corpus he collected between 2010 and 2019, which is composed of spontaneous conversations of 131 deaf people. In the second part of the lecture, he used the example of negation to show which sociolinguistic factors influence variation in BISINDO, and wich origin the negation gestures in BISINDO might have. While some are based on co-speech gestures, others seem to have evolved independently. Variation is found both at the regional level and between the language usage of men and women.
In the conversation that followed, we were able to ask Nick again about the individual negation forms in BISINDO. We also discussed which language users are driving the language change forward.