Approaching lexical variation in Swedish Sign Language

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Languages exhibit variation, which may reflect ethnic, geographic, social or age- or gender-based differences between language users. Many sign languages are known to exhibit lexical variation, with multiple sign forms being used for the same concept. Such lexical variation may derive from (historical) schools for the deaf, having resulted in school-based “dialects”. In this paper, we present our findings from a two-part study on lexical variation in Swedish Sign Language (STS) based on responses from a combined in-person and online survey and available corpus data. The survey approach consisted of a diverse group of STS signers providing their preferred sign variants for concepts within different domains (e.g., colors, numbers and place names). We focus on age as an important sociolectal factor for lexical variation in STS, and show that there may be a tendency towards leveling (convergence of forms; less variation) over time, although the results are inconclusive. We observe an increased use of borrowed forms for countries over time. Additionally, signers with similar social profiles with regard to age, gender and schooling exhibit slightly more overlap in their lexical choices, on average.