37.1042, Books: Creating a Sign Language Out of Everything and Everywhere: Martins (2026)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1042. Fri Mar 13 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1042, Books: Creating a Sign Language Out of Everything and Everywhere: Martins (2026)

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Date: 12-Mar-2026
From: Jan Martin [lotdissertations-fgw at uva.nl]
Subject: Creating a Sign Language Out of Everything and Everywhere: Martins (2026)


Title: Creating a Sign Language Out of Everything and Everywhere
Subtitle: An Example From the Deaf People of Bissau
Series Title: LOT Dissertation Series
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke
(LOT)
           http://www.lotpublications.nl/
Book URL: https://dx.medra.org/10.48273/LOT0708

Author(s): Mariana Martins

Paperback
ISBN: 978-94-6093-493-3
Pages: 469
Price: 50,00 euros

Abstract:

This thesis traces the formation of a deaf community in Guinea-Bissau
and the emergence of its sign language, Língua Gestual Guineense
(LGG), offering rare real-time documentation of how a language
develops from gestural roots. The relative absence of medical
approaches to deafness enabled a free-signing environment in schools
and informal meeting places. Within two decades, the first generation
of signers in Bissau established a proud community and shaped an
autochthonous sign language.
The analysis of gestures reveals three main pathways of incorporation
into LGG: direct incorporation, incorporation of variants, and
incorporation of overlapping networks of polysemous and synonymous
gestures. While gestures entered the lexicon with minimal change,
signers have exploited gesture variation in form and meaning to drive
lexical growth. Innovative methods relying on small-group elicitation
and deaf participants’ metalinguistic insights shed new light on the
degree of gesture conventionalisation in Bissau. Gestures serving as
communicative bridges provided a linguistic starting capital, which is
particularly evident in kinship terms. This research also discovered
that gender-based social dynamics influenced other lexical semantic
domains. For instance, male signers are likely to have created colour
and country name signs motivated by football references.
Linguistically, LGG exhibits rapid expansion through compounding,
derivation, and grammaticalisation. The latter process can be seen in
how the gesture for ‘hit’ evolved into signed markers of comparative
and emphatic structures. Altogether, LGG exemplifies both universal
processes of language creation and the imprint of a local shared
world, showing how new languages are created out of everything and
everywhere.

Linguistic Field(s): Language Documentation

Subject Language(s): Guinea-Bissau Sign Language (lgs)




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