Sign Language Linguistics

Sign Language Linguistics teaches you to investigate sign languages - their structure, their acquisition, and their use - from the perspective of a linguist. Sign languages from all around the globe show interesting similarities, but yet, they are not mutually intelligible, as they also differ from each other in significant ways. Interestingly, many of these differences reflect variation also attested in spoken languages. As a sign language linguist you are interested in how sign languages are structured, how children and adults acquire them, how they function in society, and how they are subject to change. Perhaps you are curious about differences between sign languages, problems that may arise in their acquisition, or the extent to which they are different or similar to spoken languages. You may wonder how this relates to how languages in general and sign languages in particular are processed in the brain. Or you might be interested in how sign languages may be captured in formal models that allow us to generalise across all languages that we know of, spoken and signed. These are all questions that will be asked and addressed when you study Sign Language Linguistics at the UvA.