Linguistic Ethnography and Sign Language Studies

This special issue introduces the approach of “linguistic ethno graphy” (LE) in sign language studies. While this term has been adopted by only a handful of sign language researchers in the past few years, LE has existed as a named emerging field for at least twenty years in the United Kingdom and Europe. A number of sign language researchers have done work that we see as falling under the term linguistic ethnography (LE) even when they have not classified their work as such. This introduction for the special issue gives a quick overview of what LE means, how it has emerged as a field, and what kind of sign language research work classifies as LE. In the last part, we also introduce the five articles featured in this special issue and discuss how they fit in the development of LE as a field.