Kinship terminology in SLs

Sat Dec 13 14:21:02 UTC 2008

Hi Mara, (and all the readers of this list)

My apologizes for taking part in the kinship terminology discussion on  
this late stage. I have a comment on the relationship between a sign  
language in question and the spoken language used in the surrounding:

I wrote my MA thesis in General linguistics on kinship terminology in  
Finland-Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL); "Hoyer, 2000: Variation i  
teckenspråk - En studie av släktskapsterminologi i teckenspråket hos  
finlandssvenska döva" (= Variation in Sign Language - A Study on the  
Kinship Terminology in the Sign Language of Finland-Swedish Deaf). The  
thesis is written in Swedish, so just a short comment here about some  
results. I namely found many differences between the minority sign  
language FinSSL and the sign language used by the majority of the  
Finnish Deaf people, Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) regarding kinship  
terminology.

There are about 5000 users of FinSL in Finland, but only about 150  
Deaf users of FinSSL. For the two national spoken languages in  
Finland; Finnish and Swedish, Finnish is the language used by the  
majority, while Swedish is used by about 6 % of the population. Deaf  
people using FinSL usually have Finnish as their second language, for  
reading and writing, while this language for the Deaf using FinSSL is  
Swedish.

One of the most interesting results of my study had to do with the  
similarity between how a sign language and the spoken language used in  
the surrounding community expresses some kinship terms:

In Finnish language there is only one kinship term for 'aunt' (=  
täti). The same goes for FinSL. In Swedish language 'maternal aunt' is  
moster while 'paternal aunt' is faster. In FinSSL there are also two  
different signs; MOSTER (a compound sign consisting of MOR 'mother' +  
SYSTER 'sister') and FASTER (a compound sign consisting of FAR  
'father' + SYSTER 'sister').

FinSSL also separates between the four signs for 'grandmother' and  
'grandfather' on mother's side versus father's side. In the same way  
these kinship terms are different in Swedish (mormor = 'mother's  
mother', morfar ='mother's father', farmor 'father's mother', and  
farfar = 'father's father'). However, in Finnish language the most  
terms in use do not reveal whether the grandparent in question is  
maternal or paternal (they only reveal the gender). The pattern is  
similar in FinSL.

Other kinship terms in FinSSL that reflect the transparent form of  
their equivalents in Swedish are 'maternal uncle' that is a compound  
sign MORBROR (BROR = 'brother'), and 'paternal uncle' that is a  
compound sign FARBROR. The equivalents in Finnish language are opaque,  
and that is also the case for the equivalents in FinSL. So the loan  
translations may reflect both the form of the term in the source  
language, and the arrangement of the kin classes. Of course, since  
deeper studies of the origin and the etymology of the signs are  
missing, one can not state anything definite about the reasons for the  
differences between the kinship terminology systems in the sign  
languages in question. It is however clear that there are some  
parallels between the signed and the spoken languages.

The sign languages FinSSL and FinSL are historically closely related,  
while the spoken languages that have been the main sources for their  
respective loan translations, Swedish versus Finnish are not  
genetically related. The constant contacts of FinSSL with both other  
signed languages (mainly FinSL but also Swedish Sign Language) and  
spoken languages (mainly Swedish but to certain extents also Finnish)  
result in a intertwined language contact phenomena. The kinship  
terminology is only one example of that.

Kind regards,

Karin Hoyer

Teckenspråksforskare /Viittomakielen tutkija /Sign Linguist
Teckenspråksenheten /Viittomakieliyksikkö /Sign Language Unit
Finlands Dövas Förbund rf /
Kuurojen Liitto ry /
The Finnish Association of the Deaf
P.O. Box 57, 00401 HELSINKI, FINLAND
karin.hoyer at helsinki.fi
Tel +358 9 5803463
GSM +358 50 3224065

Lainaus emaragreen at berkeley.edu:

>
> Hello, all,
>
> This is my first post so please accept my apologies if it is in any way
> unclear!  By way of introduction, let me briefly say that I am a PhD
> student in linguistic anthropology at UC Berkeley working in Nepal with
> both Nepali Sign Language signers and home signers.
>
> For a linguistics course I am currently taking, I am looking at kinship
> terminology in Nepali Sign Language and thinking about its relationships
> (semantically and morphologically) to other languages, including (spoken)
> Nepali and signed languages with which Nepali signers have had substantial
> contact.  My professor suggested that it would be of great help to gather
> some cross-linguistic data on kinship terms/structure in other sign
> languages, and I've had no luck either with articles or on-line SL
> dictionaries (except for BSL and a few KSL signs).
>
> Basically, in NSL, the distinctions made in kinship terminology (ie which
> relationships are named) exactly parallel those made in spoken  Nepali
> (the one article I found, on Argentinean Sign Language, indicated that
> this isn't the case in Argentina, in relation to Spanish).  While Nepali
> always distinguishes between male and female relatives, sometimes using
> gender suffixes and sometimes using distinct lexical items, NSL
> distinguishes between male and female by beginning all kinship terms (with
> two exceptions) with the sign for female or the sign for male.  For
> example, mother might be analyzed as "female + parent" and father as "male
> + parent," except that the morpheme glossed here as "parent" can never
> stand alone.
>
> If anyone has the time to point me towards articles or online
> dictionaries, or to provide me with a brief description of these matters
> in a sign language they know well, including a) the relationship between
> the structure of kinship terminology in the SL and in the
> relevant/dominant spoken language(s) and b) the morphological/compounding
> structure used (if any) in the individual terms that would be fantastic.
>
> Thank you and I look forward to being a part of this listserv!
> Mara
>
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>

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