Sign Languages

Sign languages are natural languages, they are not consciously invented by anyone, but rather develop spontaneously wherever deaf people have an opportunity to congregate and communicate regularly with each other. This chapter briefly explains how they do so. It examines the structure of the sentence (syntax), and then moves to the structure of the smaller units of language, those that may be compared to the meaningless but identifiable sounds of speech (phonology). The chapter ends the linguistic description with a discussion of the structure of words (morphology). There is something about human cognition that converges on a complex and rich language system with particular formal and even neurological characteristics, even when the evolutionarily dominant channel for its transmission is not available. Sign language study has also strengthened the claim that the acquisition of language by children is a natural and automatic process with a set timetable, pointing to some degree of genetic predisposition.