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From:
"Angus B. Grieve-Smith" Date: Sat Jul 1, 2000 2:00 pm Subject: Re: native speakers | ||||||||||||||||
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On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Stefan Woehrmann wrote: > You are right - Irina is a competent signer (in fact the only one in > our group ) - but there might be a little problem because her family > is from Kasachstan and I´m not informed about the influences ... Yes, that's a very important bit of information! Her parents probably speak Russian Sign Language, or a related language spoken in Kazakhstan. So she's learning one language from her parents, and another from you and from her classmates. This is normal bilingualism, and bilingual kids are very good at sorting two languages out (eventually), so her confusion shouldn't last long. But unless she has a native DGS signer to learn from, her DGS would probably not be very close to that signed by native signers whose parents are native DGS signers. Judgments about "purity" aside, if she doesn't have much contact with the DGS-signing Deaf community, she won't learn to produce signs that represent the consensus of that community, and therefore wouldn't be the best model for understanding DGS. (You agree, right, Joe?) I'd love to see some examples of the signed language used in Kazakhstan! I just moved to New York City, and there may be some people who use that language in the Russian parts of Brooklyn. Well, I'll file that on my "to do" list... -- -Angus B. Grieve-Smith Linguistics Department The University of New Mexico | ||||||||||||||||
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