Plains Indian Sign Language is a pidgin: A real important point
I chanced upon a book review that I found to be very important.
In 2012, the linguist Peter Bakker reviewed “Hand talk: Sign language among American Indian nations” by Jeffery E. Davis. This was in the International Journal of American Linguistics.
Section 3 of Bakker’s review article makes some excellent points about why Plains Indian Sign Language (you can see a bunch of it in this remarkable 1930 film) is different from other sign languages:
- PISL users don’t use mouth gestures.
- They don’t use head postures or facial expressions.
- They articulate each sign very slowly.
- PISL lacks grammatical signs, e.g. for tense, location, and so on.
Bakker summarizes: “PISL is not a primary language; it is a language used only in interethnic contacts.” Therefore: “It is a pidgin.”
This is one of the clearest cases I’ve seen made that Plains Indian Sign Language is another of the numerous pidgins of North America.
In my experience, most of us linguists receive little or no training in analyzing gestural languages, with more than 99% of our education and research going to speech (and its dependent offshoot, written language). Much appreciation to Peter for his thiinking.
