Creating and Contesting Signs in Contemporary Japan: Language Ideologies, Identity, and Community in Flux

From: Sign Language Studies | Date: October 1, 2006| Author: Nakamura, Karen | Copyright information

ETHNOGRAPHERS OF DEAF COMMUNITIES occasionally throw around terms such as American Sign Language (ASL), Irish Sign Language (ISL), or Japanese Sign Language (JSL) as if there were common agreement on what constitutes these languages.1 Various powerful language ideologies (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994) motivate us to ascribe more coherence to national sign languages than may actually be the case, especially when accounting for generational, geographic, religious, or other factors. Although we ...

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