Mississippi ASL Project

American Sign Language (ASL) is a manual language used by many deaf people in the United States and Canada. For much of its existence, ASL was believed to be a system of rudimentary gestures and signs based on the English language. However, studies that analyzed the linguistic properties of this signed ‘mode’ (Stokoe, 1960) legitimized that it was a language independent of spoken language, with its own system of principles and elements to construct meaningful utterances. Like any language, ASL is influenced by the social demographics of its users. Social demographics such as ethnicity, geographic location, age, gender, and socioeconomic status are elements that cause variation in both spoken and signed languages. ASL is a young language created by a historically marginalized group of individuals as a way to communicate thoughts and ideas in a society designed on the ability to hear. As such, ASL was recognized as an autonomous language and has been the subject of sociolinguistic research since the 1960s. Most sociolinguistic research in ASL consists of large-scale studies has been conducted in the past 15 to 20 years. No research up to date has been conducted within the geographic boundaries of a state. This pilot study examines phonological and lexical variation of ASL in Mississippi through a series of Atlas-style interviews, and identities age and geographic location as the two most significant social influences that cause variation in Mississippi.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A. in Modern Languages

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Modern Languages

Year dc:date.available

2015

Author dc:creator

• Blount, James Corey

Contributors dc:contributor

• Allison Burkette
• Felice Coles
• Tamara Warhol

• American Sign Language
• Deaf
• Education
• Linguistics
• Mississippi
• Social

Repository record dc:identifier

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/894

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:egrove.olemiss.edu:etd-1893