One Village, Two Sign Languages
Qualia, Intergenerational Relationships and the Language Ideological Assemblage in Adamorobe, Ghana
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2286265 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Kusters (0000-0001-5228-7363, Heriot-Watt University) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 48-67 |
| Publication date | 2020-05-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1055-1360 • E-ISSN: 1548-1395 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/jola.12254 |
| OpenAlex | W2989217288 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 29 |
Adamorobe signing is sweet," "The signing in Adamorobe is hard," "Adamorobe's deaf people should sign in an eye-hard way." These are discourses about signing in Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL), a sign language used in Adamorobe, an Akan farmer village in southern Ghana distinguished by a history of hereditary deafness. By calling AdaSL sweet, hard and so on, deaf people in Adamorobe attribute qualia (sensuous qualities which can include hardness, lightness, dryness, and so on) to different forms of signing. Based on fieldwork stints in Adamorobe spread over a period of 10 years, I analyze how qualic evaluations of AdaSL are expressed differently by deaf people from different generations who have had different rates of exposure to Ghanaian Sign Language in addition to AdaSL. Qualic evaluations of AdaSL are related to qualic evaluations of behavior (Gal 2013; Harkness 2015): there are parallels in discourses about AdaSL being hard and deaf people being hard of character and being hardworking strong farmers. Qualic evaluations of language and social relationships permeate discourses about intergenerational differences, constituting a recurrent theme in the language ideological assemblage (i.e., clusters of language ideologies and other ideologies that impact on language) (Kroskrity 2018
Hearing Impairment and Communication · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism
The Pragmatics of Qualia in Practice
Today there is no respect”
Sign Language Typology
Youth, Linguistic Ecology, and Language Endangerment
Language, Identity, and Power
Commercial radio
From Sissy to Sickening
On recognizing persistence in the Indigenous language ideologies of multilingualism in two Native American Communities
Estimating size, scope, and membership of the speech/sign communities of undocumented indigenous/village sign languages
(Almost) everyone here spoke Ban Khor Sign Language-Until they started using TSL
The sociolinguistic problem of generations
Feeling your own (or someone else's) face
Sign language endangerment and linguistic diversity
Sign language contact and interference
The fierceness of fronted /s
Language ideologies in the shared signing community of Adamorobe
Respecting the Language of Elders
Evaluation regimes and the qualia of quality
Tastes of Talk
Peasants, Warriors, and the Streams
Who Is Responsible for Saving the Language? Performing Generation in the Face of Language Shift
Deaf Discourse
| Citations per year | 1.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |