Last year I published an article with Fahimah Ali called "Multimodal Languaging in a Signing Community in the Bay Islands of Honduras" about ways in which deaf-blind people in a small community use language. So here's a thread to get me started on here. muse.jhu.edu/article/928057 - ThreadSky

benbraithwaite.bsky.social • 2 days ago

Last year I published an article with Fahimah Ali called "Multimodal Languaging in a Signing Community in the Bay Islands of Honduras" about ways in which deaf-blind people in a small community use language. So here's a thread to get me started on here. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/928057

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benbraithwaite.bsky.social•2 days ago

Deaf, deaf-blind, and hearing people have been signing in Roatan for over 100 years, using visual and tactile channels. Data for the paper come from a project I worked on with Kris Ali and Ian Dhanoolal with support from the Endangered Languages Documentation Project https://www.elararchive.org/dk0504/

benbraithwaite.bsky.social•2 days ago

There's very little work on the signing traditions that have come out of small communities with deaf-blind people in them, particularly outside the Global North. I know of three communities in the Caribbean where Usher Syndrome has been relatively common & expect there are many more internationally

benbraithwaite.bsky.social•2 days ago

This article was based on Fahimah's undergraduate project. She looked at how turn-taking is regulated in a conversation between two signers from the community. Both signers were deaf-blind, though one had some vision. She found visual and tactile techniques were used in the conversation.

benbraithwaite.bsky.social•2 days ago

She documented a variety of ways in which the turn-taking was efficiently regulated, the most spectacular being the throwing of one's interlocutor's hands in the air to signal the end of a turn.

benbraithwaite.bsky.social•2 days ago

It is also clear that tactile methods are not just a last resort, to be employed when one's interlocutor is blind. We mention that tactile signing is often used when addressing hearing-sighted people. It can be used for stylistic and other reasons (which we hope to explore in a future publication).

rikaklassen.bsky.social•2 days ago

Oooh, nicely written alt text. Thank you for taking the time to describe the image.

benbraithwaite.bsky.social•2 days ago

So, languaging in the Bay Islands community is multimodal. This is not a visual language on its way to become a "fully-fledged tactile language." It's a "fully-fledged" multimodal language, in which people use different channels depending on the interactional context.

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