Emerging Sign Languages of Mesoamerica

In this article, I briefly explore recent investigations regarding the emergence of sign languages in Mesoamerican contexts and examine some features that facilitate their emergence. In recent years, many studies have been documenting emerging sign languages around the world. Mesoamerica provides an interesting comparative field, since several of these sign languages appeared within the Mayan area while others emerged in communities belonging to a different spoken language family. A comparison based on the first available reports and studies conducted in this area reveals that there are many similarities but also crucial differences clearly linked to the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the surrounding communities in which these sign languages emerged. Prominent features that help and, to some extent, shape the sign language are the use of multimodal communication in the surrounding hearing community (i.e., the significant use of conventional gestures and nonverbal behaviors), the (positive) attitude toward deafness, and the shared material culture as well as cultural and communicative practices. Also, contexts of sign language use vary according to the type of speech community. For instance, there will be differences in terms of vocabulary size and degrees of conventionalization between homesign systems or sign systems (with one deaf individual), village sign languages (with multiple deaf individuals with a shared background), and community sign languages (with multiple deaf individuals without a shared background) (Meir et al. 2012).