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Sign Languages in Contact
The 13th Volume in the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series From CHOICE These essays focus on contact not between spoken and signed languages, but between signers of different sign languages. The processes that occur in contact between signed languages appear to be the same as those between spoken languages (convergence, borrowing, language shift, etc.). The essays are all interesting and scholarly but represent a variety of approaches. Two use lexicostatistics to support their claims, while the others have a more historical, sociological, or ethnographic approach. All are worth reading and will appeal to a variety of academic audiences. The six essays, divided into four not especially useful sections, discuss sign language contact in North America, Albania, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Israel; two sections have only one essay. Otherwise, Quinto-Pozos’s edited volume, part of the “Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities” series, should be of great interest not only to scholars of sign language, but also to those interested in language contact. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. David Quinto-Pozos is Assistant Professor, Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. ISBN 1-56368-356-3, 978-1-56368-356-5, 6 x 9 casebound, 252 pages, photographs, figures, tables, references, index $85.00s
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