Contact sign
sign language variety that arises from contact between deaf people using a sign language and hearing people using an oral language
A contact sign language, or contact sign, is a variety or style of language that arises from contact between deaf individuals using a sign language and hearing individuals using an oral language (or the written or manually coded form of the oral language). Contact languages also arise between different sign languages, although the term pidgin rather than contact sign is used to describe such phenomena.
Contact sign has been characterized as "a sign language that has elements of both [a] natural sign language and the surrounding [oral] language".
Language contact
Language contact is extremely common in most Deaf communities, which are almost always located within a dominant oral language ('hearing') culture. Deaf people are exposed to the oral language that surrounds them, if only in visual forms like lip reading or writing, from early childhood. Within everyday life it is not uncommon for Deaf people to be in contact with oral languages. Hearing parents and teachers of deaf children, if they sign at all, are usually second language learners, and their signing style will exhibit features of interference from the oral language. A mixing of languages and modes may also occur when interpreting between a spoken and a sign language.
While deaf sign languages are distinct from spoken languages, with a different vocabulary and grammar, a boundary between the two is often hard to draw. A language 'continuum' is often described between signing with a strong sign-language grammar to signing with a strong spoken-language grammar, the middle-regions of which are often described as contact sign (or Pidgin Sign).
The public source identifies “Contact sign” as sign language variety that arises from contact between deaf people using a sign language and hearing people using an oral language. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Contact, sign and language.
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This entry incorporates text from “Contact sign” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.