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Evolutionary dynamics in the dispersal of sign languages - PubMed

  • ️Wed Jan 01 2020

. 2020 Jan 22;7(1):191100.

doi: 10.1098/rsos.191100. eCollection 2020 Jan.

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Evolutionary dynamics in the dispersal of sign languages

Justin M Power et al. R Soc Open Sci. 2020.

Abstract

The evolution of spoken languages has been studied since the mid-nineteenth century using traditional historical comparative methods and, more recently, computational phylogenetic methods. By contrast, evolutionary processes resulting in the diversity of contemporary sign languages (SLs) have received much less attention, and scholars have been largely unsuccessful in grouping SLs into monophyletic language families using traditional methods. To date, no published studies have attempted to use language data to infer relationships among SLs on a large scale. Here, we report the results of a phylogenetic analysis of 40 contemporary and 36 historical SL manual alphabets coded for morphological similarity. Our results support grouping SLs in the sample into six main European lineages, with three larger groups of Austrian, British and French origin, as well as three smaller groups centring around Russian, Spanish and Swedish. The British and Swedish lineages support current knowledge of relationships among SLs based on extra-linguistic historical sources. With respect to other lineages, our results diverge from current hypotheses by indicating (i) independent evolution of Austrian, French and Spanish from Spanish sources; (ii) an internal Danish subgroup within the Austrian lineage; and (iii) evolution of Russian from Austrian sources.

Keywords: language evolution; language phylogeny; phylogenetic networks; sign language.

© 2020 The Authors.

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Conflict of interest statement

We declare we have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.

Contemporary and historical SLs in our sample, with locations being derived from Glottolog [36] for contemporary languages and from city of publication for historical MAs.

Figure 2.
Figure 2.

Simplified coding example for handshapes representing Latin 〈g〉, and its counterparts in Cyrillic, Greek and Persian/Urdu.

Figure 3.
Figure 3.

Neighbour-net based on simple (Hamming) pairwise distances calculated from the standard-coded CogID binary matrix. Colours highlight the main groups and the Danish subgroup (cf. figure 4; electronic supplementary material, 4.2, figures S2–S4) within the Austrian-origin lineage. Neighbourhood-defining edge-bundles are also highlighted.

Figure 4.
Figure 4.

Time-/taxon-filtered stacked Neighbour-nets, based on the same distance matrix used for figure 3. Bottom NNet: SLs up to 1840; middle NNet: 1808–late twentieth century; top NNet: mid-twentieth century–present. Abbreviation: SG denotes potential subgroups within the French-origin group. MAs included in two subsequent NNets are connected by dashed lines.

Figure 5.
Figure 5.

Hypothesized dispersal of European SLs from late sixteenth to late nineteenth century, based on results in §3. Colour-coding reflects five hypothesized lineages: Spanish, French-origin, Austrian-origin, British-origin, Swedish. Timeline reflects approximate years of first transmission of SLs, coinciding with establishment of schools for the deaf or migrations of signers (except in the cases of 1 and 2, which track publication of earliest MAs in sample).

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