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Emerging sign languages provide the opportunity to observe the process by which signers create and converge on a lexicon. Some studies report that emerging sign languages exhibit more lexical and sub-lexical variation than their longer-established counterparts, which has been interpreted as evidence for a lack of conventionalization. However, a growing body of recent literature takes the view that this variation is not random but rather shaped by the social organization of the signing community. The present study aims to test the hypothesis that variation is conditioned by frequency of interaction, focusing on Zinacantec Family Homesign (‘Z sign’), a sign language developed over the past four decades by members of an extended family in an indigenous community of southern Mexico. The investigation takes into account both lexical variation and sub-lexical variation, across signers as well as within individual signers over time. These quantitative data are interpreted in terms of a model of the family as a sociolinguistic community that can be sub-divided according to patterns of interaction among different members of the family. This study contributes to the literature on variation in micro-community sign languages by examining the impact of interaction on the distribution variation at two levels of linguistic organization in an almost maximally small linguistic community. 

In this paper, I explore metalinguistic discourse in Zinacantec Family Homesign (‘Z sign’), an emergent sign language developed by three deaf siblings and their hearing family members. In particular, I examine how metalinguistic discourse unfolds between a hearing Z signer and various members of her family—including her deaf siblings, her elderly hearing father, and her young hearing son. I do so via a close examination of several snippets of conversation in which the Z signers talk about the “right” way to sign, paying close attention to how they mobilize various semiotic devices, including manual signs, eye gaze, facial expressions, and speech. I aim to understand not only the formal components of metalinguistic discourse in Z sign but also how it functions as a form of social action in this small linguistic community. How do members of this family position themselves and others as (in)competent, (non-)authoritative signers in light of existing social divisions among them? How do they reinforce or challenge those social divisions through metalinguistic discourse? How might metalinguistic discourse contribute to the propagation of emergent linguistic norms throughout the family? I find that a recurrent device for enacting metalinguistic critique among the Z signers is the partial re-production and transformation of others’ utterances and other visible actions, manifested in a way that exploits the availability of multiple, semi-independent manual and non-manual articulators in the visual modality. 

This study traces the development of discrete, combinatorial structure in Zinacantec Family Homesign (‘Z Sign’), a sign language developed since the 1970s by several deaf siblings in Mexico (Haviland 2020b), focusing on the expression of motion. The results reveal that the first signer, who generated a homesign system without access to language models, represents motion events holistically. Later-born signers, who acquired this homesign system from infancy, distribute the components of motion events over sequences of discrete signs. Furthermore, later-born signers exhibit greater regularity of form-meaning mappings and increased articulatory efficiency. Importantly, these changes occur abruptly between the first- and second-born signers, rather than incrementally across signers. This study extends previous findings for Nicaraguan Sign Language (Senghas et al. 2004) to a social group of a much smaller scale, suggesting that the parallel processes of cultural transmission and language acquisition drive language emergence, regardless of community size. 

The visual-gestural modality affords its users simultaneous movement of several independent articulators and thus lends itself to simultaneous encoding of information. Much research has focused on the fact that sign languages coordinate two manual articulators in addition to a range of non-manual articulators to present different types of linguistic information simultaneously, from phonological contrasts to inflection, spatial relations, and information structure. Children and adults acquiring a signed language arguably thus need to comprehend and produce simultaneous structures to a greater extent than individuals acquiring a spoken language. In this paper, we discuss the simultaneous encoding that is found in emerging and established sign languages; we also discuss places where sign languages are unexpectedly sequential. We explore potential constraints on simultaneity in cognition and motor coordination that might impact the acquisition and use of simultaneous structures.