Tactile sign languages

Louisa Willoughby, Shimako Iwasaki, Meredith Bartlett & Howard Manns
Monash University, Melbourne
Table of contents

Within the field of sign language linguistics, an emerging area of interest is the sign language forms used by people who are both deaf and blind. In very simple terms, a deafblind signer will follow a conversation by placing one or both hands on top of the hands of someone who is signing. However, as this chapter will explore, the move from a visual to tactile mode of perception necessitates a number of adaptations in the way a message is communicated. Whether these changes lead to minor modifications of the existing visual sign language, the emergence of a new language specifically designed for tactile production and reception or something in between arguably differs depending on both the individual deafblind signer and the communities in which they are imbedded. In this entry we set out to give an overview of what is known about distinctive pragmatic strategies employed by deafblind signers around the world, be they linguistic or non-linguistic; highly codified or somewhat idiosyncratic adaptions. Our goal in taking a broad-sweeping view in this chapter is to give an overview of the different ways in which deafblind people respond to the challenge of communication with limited or no access to the visual or auditory channel, and to consider what (if any) insights this might give about pragmatics in human communication more generally. We note that the choice of terms to describe these ways of signing is potentially problematic, as calling something a “tactile sign language” might seem to be making claims that the variety has diverged markedly from the parent sign language (i.e. is a ‘new’ language) and/or has been specifically optimised for tactile delivery. However, within this relatively new field of research and interpreting practice “tactile sign language” or “tactile [sign language name]” has become the default way of referring to the form of signing used by deafblind people, and is thus our umbrella term of choice in this entry.

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