[Lingtyp] Can sign languages be included together with spoken languages in areal typology?

[Joo Ian]

Dear all,

I’ve been wondering whether sign languages can/should be analyzed along with spoken languages in areal typolgy.
It is well known that sign languages can be significantly influenced by the spoken languages used in the same area. Thus, logically it’s possible that sign languages bear certain areal characteristics together with the spoken languages of the same region (e. g. sign languages of MSEA regions bearing certain MSEA characteristics).
But there are two main challenges in analyzing sign languages and spoken languages together in areal typology:

1. Two different modalities, which means that linguistic features present in languages of one modality may not be easily comparable to those in languages of another modality. For example, it would be difficult (although not impossible) to group together the voice intonation of spoken languages and the visual intonation of sign languages and see if there are any areal intonational features that certain spoken/sign languages share.
2. Many standard sign languages have been introduced to their country only very recently from the sign languages of the colonizers. For example, Korean SL was introduced to Korea from Japan during the Japanese colonial period, and even though it significantly diverged from Japanese SL since then to a mutually unintelligible level, I’m not sure if one century is enough time to develop a sufficient amount of areal features distinct from JSL.

I would like to hear your opinion about whether sign languages could/should be grouped together with spoken languages in order to investigate areal biases, or should they rather be analyzed in their own right to see if they have linguistic areas of their own different from spoken language areas. Since I have little knowledge on sign languages, any help would be greatly appreciated.

From Hong Kong,
Ian
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