The Properties Of South African Sign Language: Lexical Diversity & Syntactic Unity

A growing literature deals with various aspects of South African Sign Language (SASL), including works on the history, lexicography, sociolinguistics, and educational uses and implications of SASL (Landman 1990, Penn 1992a, b, 1993, Penn & Reagan 1990, Penn & Reagan 1991). Much of this literature emphasizes the degree and extent of diversity in SASL. The origins of this diversity have generally been attributed to (a) the history of deaf education in the country, (b) the segregation policies of the apartheid regime (multiple educational systems, geographic separation, and ethnic and linguistic diversity in the national population), and (c) a number of other causes (see Penn 1992b, 1993, Penn & Reagan 1990, Penn & Reagan 1991). This diversity, while of considerable interest to sign language researchers, has inevitably been assumed to raise many practical problems and concerns for those involved in education, and it has been a factor of concern to deaf people themselves as they seek greater cultural and linguistic unity. In this paper we argue that SASL is indeed marked by a high degree of lexical diversity, but there appears to be an underlying common syntactic and morphological base on which all of the different varieties are grounded. We will suggest further that this common syntactic and morphological base provides a foundation on which future educational and language policy with respect to deaf people may be developed.