Lexical Variation and Schoolization in Sign Languages: The case of South African Sign Language

Abstract: Variation occurs in sign languages, just as in spoken languages. Lexical variation is very common and has been related to individual schools for the deaf, so-called schoolization , rather than only to region or other common sociolinguistic factors, such as gender, social class, etc. (Baker et al. 2016). This study investigates lexical variation in South African Sign Language (SASL) in a young section of the deaf population in order to test the schoolization hypothesis. In the context of a dictionary project, fifty participants from twenty schools across South Africa produced signs on the basis of a list of 173 lemmas, created using an extended version of Woodward's (2003) list. The analysis was based on 630 sign variants. Considerable variation was found in the number of sign variants per lemma (one to eleven, average 3.9), comparable to findings in other sign languages. This is lower than the variation reported in an earlier SASL study (Penn and Reagan 1994), so some standardization has taken place. In a pair-wise comparison of schools, with respect to overlap, it was clear that no school has a variety of SASL that stood alone from the others. Some of the overlap could be related to iconicity and lexical borrowing from sign languages important in the history of deaf education in South Africa. The amount of overlap between schools ranged from 30 to 73 percent and was not necessarily higher between all schools from the same province. The hypothesis of schoolization is therefore consistent with the findings in the South African context.