Presented at COLANG 2024.
Linguistic heritage includes not only the spoken languages used by hearing communities, but also the sign languages used by Deaf communities. While large national sign languages (ASL, LSF, etc.) have grammars, dictionaries, pedagogical materials and teaching traditions, smaller sign languages---and Indigenous sign languages in particular---are under-resourced. In this context, we turn to Mesoamerica, where there are a number of small sign languages due to high rates of congenital deafness in various Maya communities.
The status of these languages is precarious. They are under the same pressures that spoken Indigenous languages face--e.g., emigration and immigration breaking up small linguistic communities, as well as pressure from a nearby non-Indigenous sign language with greater official recognition and support. The goal of our project is to describe the grammar of these languages for the first time, comparing to the culturally-grounded gestures used by the hearing community. In this talk, we focus on methodologies for documenting Indigenous sign languages in multimodal contexts, and how documentation of this kind can support the vitality of Indigenous sign languages.