Plains Indian Sign Language Information
The Plains Indian sign languages (PISL) are various manually coded languages used, or formerly used, by various Native Americans of the Great Plains of the United States of America and Canada. The best known is Plains Standard Sign Language, a contact language (international auxiliary language) used between these peoples.
Contents |
History
PISL's antecedents, if any, are unknown, due to lack of written records, but the earliest records of contact between Europeans and Native Americans of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the Europeans' arrival there.[1] These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541.
As a result of several factors, including the massive depopulation and the Americanization of Native North Americans, the number of PISL signers declined from European arrival onward. In 1885, it was estimated that there were over 110,000 “sign-talking Indians”, including Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa and Arapaho.[2] By the 1960s, there remained a “very small percentage of this number”.[2] There are few PISL signers today.[3]
W.P. Clark who served in the United States Army on the northern plains during the Indian Wars was the author of The Indian Sign Language, first published in 1885, The Indian Sign Language with Brief Explanatory Notes of the Gestures Taught Deaf-Mutes in Our Institutions and a Description of Some of the Peculiar Laws, Customs, Myths, Superstitions, Ways of Living, Codes of Peace and War Signs, remains in print.
Geography
Sign language use has been documented across speakers of at least 37 spoken languages in twelve families,[4] spread across an area of over 1 million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers).[5] In recent history, it was highly developed among the Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa, among others, and remains strong among the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho.
Each nation used a distinct manually coded language, as was the case in aboriginal Australia. In addition, there was a trade pidgin that may have never been extensively used, or was only used by a well-traveled elite. This contact language may be distinguished as Plains Standard SL, as opposed to the generic term Plains Indian SL for the various ethnic forms. These were reportedly not used by the deaf, who used home sign instead.
Signing may have started in the south, perhaps in northern Mexico or Texas, and only spread into the plains in recent times, though this suspicion may be an artifact of European observation. Sign, or at least contact sign, spread to the Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Caddo after their removal to Oklahoma. Via the Crow, it replaced the divergent Plateau Sign Language among the eastern nations that used it, the Coeur d’Alene, Sanpoil, Okanagan, Thompson, Lakes, Shuswap, and Coleville in British Columbia, with western nations shifting instead to Chinook Jargon.
The various nations with attested use, divided by language family, are:
- Piman: Pima, Papago, and continuing into northern Mexico
- isolates of the Texas coast: Coahuilteco, Tonkawa, Karankawa, Atakapa
- Yuman: Maricopa
- Numic: Paiute, Ute, Comanche, Shoshone
- Kiowa
- Tanoan: Taos Pueblo
- Zuni Pueblo
- Caddoan: Wichita, Pawnee, Arikara
- Athabaskan: Apache (Mescalero, Lipan, Jicarilla, and Kiowa Apache), Sarcee, Beaver
- Algonquian: Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Cree, Ojibwa
- Kutenai
- Siouan: Mandan, Crow, Hidatsa, Omaha, Osage, Assinibion, Ponca, Oto, Sioux (Teton, Yankton, Yanktonai, Santee)
- Sahaptian: Nez Perce, Sahaptin, Umatilla, Palus
- Cayuse
- Salish: Kalispel, Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, Spokane, Sanpoil (shifted from the distinct Plateau Sign Language)
A distinct form is also reported from the Wyandot of Ohio.
See also
References
- ^ Wurtzburg, Susan, and Campbell, Lyle. North American Indian Sign Language: Evidence for its Existence before European Contact. International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 153-167.
- ^ a b Tomkins, William. Indian sign language. [Republication of "Universal Indian Sign Language of the Plains Indians of North America" 5th ed. 1931]. New York : Dover Publications 1969. (p. 7)
- ^ Ethnologue report for Plain Indian Sign Language
- ^ Davis, Jeffrey. 2006. “A historical linguistic account of sign language among North American Indian groups.” In Multilingualism and Sign Languages: From the Great Plains to Australia; Sociolinguistics of the Deaf community, C. Lucas (ed.), Vol. 12, pp. 3–35. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press
- ^ Hand Talk: American Indian Sign Language.
Further reading
- Newell, Leonard E. (1981). A stratificational description of Plains Indian Sign Language. Forum Linguisticum 5: 189-212.
- "Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes," First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-1880, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1881, pages 263-552
- Clark, William Philo. 1885. The Indian Sign Language
External links
| This Indigenous languages of the Americas-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. · · |
| This article relating to the Indigenous peoples of North America is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. · · |
Categories: Sign languages | Pidgins and creoles | Interlinguistics |
|