Are there accents in sign languages?
You can often tell where someone grew up by how they talk, and the same is true for how someone signs. The fine details of how you sign has a kind of signature that tells people where you're from, how old you are, what school you attended, your race, your identity, even who you often talk to. In sign languages, accents can be about which signs a person uses, but they can also show up in more subtle details like where on the body a sign is produced, which handshape is used, and whether you use one hand or two.
Social factors like region and educational background influence phonetic variation in signed languages, much like accents in spoken languages
Signing reflects history
Some of the most important work in this area is on Black ASL, the variety used by many Black deaf Americans. It exists because of segregation: for decades, Black deaf children were excluded from the white schools that pushed speech-only education, so Black schools kept ASL in daily use. One result, documented by Carolyn McCaskill and colleagues, is that Black ASL preserved older forms of the language that mainstream ASL moved away from. To learn more, check out Learn Black American Sign Language, a book written by Center faculty member, Franklin Jones Jr.
Newer studies look at how signers use variation to express identity. A study about the sign language use of deaf gay men found that they produced signs with more distal joints (i.e., bending the wrist more than the elbow), which may can mark belonging to a community. Research on Indonesian Sign Language shows signers using variation to signal regional pride, deaf identity, and attitudes about the growing influence of ASL in their country.
Signers adapt to each other
A chapter by Amelia Becker, by Deaf Center Postdoctoral Scholar, Amelia A. Becker, and her collaborators Julie A. Hochgesang, Meredith Tamminga, and Jami N. Fisher highlights a study of a Philadelphia variant of ASL. It looks at how often signers temporarily switch which hand is the dominant hand. Everyone switches hands to sign occasionally, like when one hand is holding a coffee cup, but signers also sometimes do it for no obvious physical reason.
The researchers followed one signer across three conversations. When the signer was talking with a partner who rarely reversed hands, he almost never did either (about 1 percent of the time). But when talking with a partner who reversed often, his rate climbed to 4 percent, then 7 percent. This suggests that the way we sign can be influenced by the person we are talking to.
Read More: Becker, A. A., Hochgesang, J. A., Tamminga, M., & Fisher, J. N. (2023). Sociophonetics and signed languages. In The Routledge Handbook of Sociophonetics.
