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Moderator: why don't we get started with our last paper
before the session.

Kristian: okay good morning
to conclude this conference and this
session on sign languages we're going
to do something a bit different we're
going to talk about documenting language
in visual and tactile modality based on
our research on a sign language found in
the bay islands Honduras my name is
Kristian Ali and you know Ben
and as you can see from the first slide that half of our team isn't here
and it's very important to not leave
them out because they are both deaf
researchers from Trinidad and Tobago so we'll
talk a little bit more about the
importance later on so the language
we're talking about is used in the
bay islands which politically belongs to
Honduras but has many cultural and
historical links to the English /
English Creole speaking Caribbean and
just to give you an idea where we're
from this is Trinidad and Tobago this is bay islands
so the Bay Islands
comprise many small islands but the main
three are Utila, Roatan, and Guanaja which is
the english Creole name is ?Guanaja? so
that's a name we'll be using in its
presentation
so the language that
we're focusing on comes from the tongue
of French Harbor which is located in
Roatan which is the largest of the
bay islands and also found in Guanaja so the
language community in French Harbor
identify as Islanders as opposed to
mainlanders which is used to refer to
people from Honduras the major
distinction between the two communities two
groups would be their linguistic
identity mainlanders use Spanish which
is you know the official language of
Honduras but the Islanders have English
Creole identity the English Creole
speaking ancestors came from the Cayman
Islands in the early 19th century
following the abolition of slavery there
the Islander still
speak this English Creole well even though
Spanish is the official language and
they deem that Creole to be endangered
because it's completely left out of
Education. Spanish is official language
of Education and even more so than ever
now there's a large many many people
from the mainland and now coming from
it's coming to the bay Islands to set up
businesses so feels like their English
creole is being threatened but our presentation
isn't about that English creole it's about
language used by deaf blind people in
French harbor due to a higher rate of
Usher syndrome Usher syndrome is a
genetic condition which causes children
to be born pre-lingually deaf and to
gradually lose their sight as they age
as our simplified family tree shows
user syndrome - well the black represents
people with Usher syndrome so they're
deaf and blind - and as you can see it
goes back to the great grandparents
generation it seems that usher syndrome
was brought from the Cayman Islands
early 19th century when there was a mass
migration to the bay islands so from our own
research in August of last year we found
deafblind people with Usher syndrome and
Grand Cayman which is the biggest of the
Cayman Islands who seem to be related to
those people in French harbor so we
could it could be said that this
language this tactile language has
existed in the bay islands for as long as this
family has been in the islands and then
before that it was used in Cayman
Islands
it's important to note that it isn't
limited to just this family it is also
used by their friends and their families
so there's a tactile sign language being
used not just by deafblind people also
hearing and sighted people. alright so
just to give you an idea of what the
language looks like I'm sorry about the dark footage
but that's what we have. [buzzing noises and indistinct speaking]
okay so this is in French harbor you
could see two generations of users of
this tactile sign language this is a
person with usher syndrome. she's
deaf and blind
that's her sister who's hearing and
sighted it but is communicating with
her using that tactile sign language and
on her right you can't see her properly
but that's her nice and she's fizzy young
and she also knows how to use tactile
sign language shes hearing and sighted as well
this language
not only exists in Roatan but also kind
of it moved to guanaco when this woman
on the left
she has usher syndrome she's deaf and blind
married a month from guanaco on the
right who is deaf doesn't have usher syndrome just is deaf and she moved to guanaco
to live there with him they both have
hearing children and hearing
grandchildren with whom they sign in
tactile and visual modalities so
signing is used well beyond the family in
Bonacca so this deaf man owns a
significant amount of land which he
farms and he is the only producer honey
on the island we accompanied him as he
walked around the island selling his
honey for an entire day and everyone he
interacted with which was a lot of
people used sign language to talk to him that
is lots of hearing villagers. in the
literature that exists on sign languages
and situations like this it's common
listed as a village sign
language situation but we would say
maybe the island silage situation
because many villages in one tiny island

Ben: okay so Kristian has given you some
kind of basics on the place and the
language that we've been looking at and
I'm just going to say a few things about
issues related to documenting that
language so really we've only made that
our first contact we had a short trip
last year One of the things that's
different about the language different
compared to I guess every other language
talked about in this conference is that
it's expressed it can be expressed in
the tactile modality. it 
can be expressed purely through touch
and it regularly is and so if you want
to document this language you have to be
able to document it in its visual
modality and also in its tactile
modality so on the slide here I've got
two examples of words in the language
being expressed first on the left hand
side in for a visual in a visual way so
if the person is signing to someone who
can see and then on the right you have
the same word being articulated in a
tactile way so on the top left there
what you have is our name sign
so articulated like this and on the
right what you have is when the hearing
and sighted person on the left is
talking to the deafblind person on the
right they articulate that side by
taking the interlocutors hand placing it
on their own head and signing like that
so that's the same sign in two
modalities and you have the same thing
on the bottom there so on the left you
have the sign mother being articulated
in the visual modality and then on the
right you have the same sign being
articulated in the tactile modality so
obviously it's important if we're going
to document a language like this that we
need to document it in all its various
modalities in all its various forms and
in order to do that we need to make sure
that we get different kinds of
conversations between different kinds
people so depending on whether there are
people involved in a conversation can
see or not and can hear or not the
language will be articulated differently
so a documentation project has to 
obviously bear those things in mind and
not only that but the kind of
communication strategies that are used
within these communities that
we're talking about are also richly
multimodal and complex so one of the
other things that we came across was
what we're calling arm writing and
I've got a short clip of that [buzzing and indistinct noises]
so that's that's my arm and I was having
a conversation with one of the people in
French Harbor who is deafblind and that
seemed to be something that was quite
commonly used as well so writing seems
to be in English primarily often
initials and things like that but it
seems to be something that somewhat
conventionalized so we want to make sure
that if we're documenting this language
community we document its communicative
practices and its linguistic behaviors
in all their richness if we can not try
to sort of restrict it and say well this
bit is worthy of documentation but that
bit is not obviously there is also an
issue with documenting language in the
tactile modality we're relying as you
can see primarily on videography on
taking videos and documenting a tactile
language using video is not
straightforward no sometimes maybe not
not exactly possible especially if you
have conversations between two deafblind
people where the it's entirely in the
tactile modality it's difficult to
capture that just using video and we
don't really have a solution to that to
be honest what we have is some
suggestions and some strategies that we
used one of which is to take lots of
notes that when we're creating
documentation of this kind of language
that documentation has to be augmented
by a lot of annotation a lot of
additional information that might be
missing so that you can try to
reconstruct what's happening in the
communicative event that you can see
also working very closely and very
carefully with the signers the various
kinds of signers on understanding what's
going on and all of the information
that's required in order to interpret
the communicative and linguistic
behaviors that are going on
and another aspect of this is as
in many rural signing communities
there's a lot of pointing pointing is
used we observe pointing being used both
in the visual and the tactile modality
when referring to places and people they
did have name signs but they didn't seem
to use name signs for places and instead
when they were talking about people or
places often they would point and
they'll point to a real place so the
direction of your point is not
grammatical as it might be in a language
like air so but it's actually towards
the location that you're talking about
or the house of the individual that
you're talking about and of course this
means that there's a lot of contextual
information in that it's a very context
dependent language and again in order to
reconstruct the kind of documentation
that you might do with video you need to
have that information recorded as well
maybe information about the orientation
of recording setup information about the
geography of the space and so on and
without that you know video alone is
going to be not very revealing or not
very useful and Kristian mentioned at
the beginning when she was saying that
two of our, half our team is not here and
she mentioned that that was very
important and it really was I think this
is something has come up in a couple of
presentations that we've had already in
this session but part of our, half our
research team were deaf they were like
us from Trinidad and Tobago this is Kimone
in one of the recordings we did
with some of the deaf and deafblind
signers and we found that it made an
enormous difference to what we were able
to achieve having deaf people on the
research team for various reasons I
think one reason was as soon as we met
deaf people
in the bay islands and they introduced
themselves in and kamon introduce
themselves that I'm deaf too there was
instantly a kind of a bond that that we
couldn't hope to achieve I think there's
hearing people and that made a huge
difference in you know when you're when
you're in that initial situation meeting
people for the first time it's really
the kind of bond that you make at first
I think is really really important in a
fieldwork situation and as I say deaf
people were able to do that with other
deaf people in a way that I think is
more difficult if you're not but not
only that also what we found was that
the deaf researchers were just much
better at interpreting this language
which has never been described before
never doesn't have a name there's no
materials there's no documentary
materials I think Samantha was saying in
the last presentation that she would ask
people in Papua New Guinea
do you have deaf people do you have a
sign language and they would say no and
then she'd see them signing later on
well we have a similar we have similar
types experiences as well we would ask
people if they knew how to sign or they
knew sign language and they would say no
and they would turn out they did know
sign language I think they just didn't
call it sign language when they think of
sign language they think of something
that has well I guess it's the thing
about languages are things that are in
books languages are things that you have
dictionaries languages the things that
have written down grammars and what they
use doesn't have any of those things so
they don't think of it as a language
they don't think of it as a proper sign
language maybe they think of something
like American sign language is a real
language and what they use is just their
thing but so we're working in a
situation where we have this language
that hasn't been documented before and
that's that's quite a challenge going
into that situation and trying to
understand what's happening and try to
to start to communicate and we found
that the deaf researchers on the team
were extremely skilled at doing that and
I think that that's because they are
both native sign language users both
Ian and Kimone their first language is
Trinidad and Tobago sign language so
they had never seen this language before
didn't know this language they're not
native users obviously of this language
but the fact that their brains are
structured to as native users of a
visual language I think made a big
difference to their ability to
understand and to interpret and to work
with another visual language on top of
that was the tactile issue as well so
I've talked about some of the issues
about how we went about starting to
document this language situation and
some of the considerations I want to
finish by talking about some of the why
why document this language situation
well usually we would talk about
language endangerment as one of the
reasons for documenting a language and
languages endangered again often
endangered by contact with other
international languages as in actually
the last presentation we heard about
people from Gallaudet University coming
to Nigeria and bringing with them
signing exact English materials and when
we were in the Bay Islands we found that
deaf people that we met there had some
signing exact English and ASL materials
brought to them by American missionaries
so there's contact as a contact
situation already and although they
didn't seem very keen at all I think
their attitude towards the missionaries
was reflected in their attitude towards
American Sign Language ie not very
interested and they or had also had
contact with other missionaries with
Jehovah's Witnesses who were using
Honduran sign language another
completely distinct sign language so
there's a complex language contact
situation and that when you have books
and you have written materials for those
languages and you don't for this small
rural language that poses a threat to
the future of the language
I think a more serious that more
immediate threat is the fact that from
that family tree that Christian showed
you earlier actually the youngest person
with Usher syndrome that we met was in
their late 30s and although it seems
like the genes for Usher syndrome must
be pretty prevalent in this community
there weren't any younger people with
Usher syndrome that we met so there's a
pretty distinct possibility that this
may just there may just stop being people
with Usher syndrome in this community in
which case the language is likely to
disappear
so certainly endangered when we talk to
people in the community about their
attitude towards documentation what it
meant to them one thing that came out
very clearly was their attitudes towards
their own culture and heritage and
history and language Kristian talked
about the creole language there I'm
going to show you now just a short clip
with the sign in this language for
Spanish I think it's used for the
language it's also used to refer to
mainlanders people from mainland
Honduras coming to the Bay Islands so
I'm just going to play that clip quickly
and you need to look to the left
you can hear saying it as she signs in
Spanish like that and I think that's a
fairly reasonable representation of the
attitudes within this community to the
threats from the mainland in terms of
their cultural identity their linguistic
identity some extent I think their
ethnic identity as well and so they're
talking about documenting this
indigenous sign language that they had
did seem to strike a chord with them
because there was a similar kind of
situation you had Honduran sign language
an American sign language being
introduced from the outside and yet you
had this indigenous system this local
system that was entirely theirs and
represented that own heritage their own
culture their own history as well so
people seem to be very interested in
documenting that for that reason and a
couple a few other reasons i'm going to
finish with a few other reasons - well time up - very few other reasons for that
we think for documenting this language
this language situation one thing that
we found was that again the fact that
they had this language in the community
meant that deaf blind people that we met
living in French Harbor lived
independently in their own houses alone
we met there was a deaf blind man who
works full-time has his own job his boss
uses tactile sign language with him his
colleagues use tactile sign language
with him he uses he has many friends who
he communicates with easily this is a
language that provides that allows
people to be well socially economically
and I think in terms of their health as
well we think the documenting will help
to validate and give recognition to this
system which is which is achieving this
end we think that perhaps although it's
already doing over a great deal there's
no kind of system in place for training
say service providers medical
professionals or anything like that so
that they can communicate
directly with the deafblind people in
this community and that could be
something that could come out of
documentation and I think I want to
finish by saying in the last
presentation we heard a little bit about
colonial influences in Papua New Guinea
and in Nigeria and of course in the
Caribbean we know all about that
and often when we're thinking about how
do we provide inclusion and human rights
for deaf people and deaf blind people
we look towards the developed world the
first world we look towards the United
States for models of inclusion and
models of development and I think this
in this case what we have is an
indigenous model that is already
providing deaf and deafblind people with
a certain amount of inclusion and
support and sometimes what we need to do
is not necessarily to look outside we
can take lessons from outside I'm
thinking especially of things like
Woody's work that he presented today
there's so much that we could take from
that but we can also document what
already exists what we already have as a
model for inclusion

Kristian: We would like to thank the language communities in Guanaja and Roatan for sharing their knowledge with us and I would like to
personally thank the National Science
Foundation for sponsoring my attendance
at this conference. Thank you.

Audience: I just had a quick question
about um if you've noticed any any new
features based on using the tactile
modalities so for example like with the
visual modality we use space and
non-concatenative morphology and that
kind of thing but I didn't know if you
were noticing that they were using the
tactile modalities like with pressure or
something like that to also be used in
communication

Ben: yeah well one thing we
really an early stage of understanding
this but one thing that one sort of
hypothesis that I have is that it seemed
that even those signs being expressed in
the visual modality so signs in a
way you'd be familiar with there seem
to be a lot of signs a high proportion
of signs with contact either contact
with the body you know you saw that name
sign or that sign for mother or contact
between the two hands and there seem to
be very few signs okay I'll show you the
sign for Trinidad and Tobago where we're from
that's trinidad and tobago
and there are very few signs like that
in this language as far as we could see
and we think maybe that could be because
it's easier to transpose signs with
which already have contact into the
tactile modality because you know they
involved touch already so that might be a
sort of modality feature

Audience: I was struck by what appears to be a
very different interaction
they sniffing you know face-to-face kind
of communication I don't know is it
normal that people sitting behind
someone would be signing with them or is
it normal face to face

Ben: yeah I think what
was happening partly in that video is
that other people sort of coming and
going from behind so that they weren't
necessarily involved in the
communication that much with the with
the tactile modality though they yeah
that sometimes people would say without
looking at them so I think the you know
the younger girl will be sitting to the
side and [trails off]

Audience Member: I think that's something. I don't know if you've had any access to tactile signing in other communities or research on that but I think it's very clear that this has some interesting differences and it's also the case that
in the tactile signing that i've seen most of it's done where the deaf
person puts their hands on the other person's hand
usually it's the deaf person is using two hands while the hearing signer may be using one or two hands but
the hands are still on the on the
hearing side
So I think there are some really interesting things.

Audience: I wanted to mention the research team in Italy near Venice that do work with visual and tactile modality
I don't know if you know them but I think that they have a good system in place for how to code those things.
What I have heard from them is a little bit different from this because they are always face to face
And the position of the hands on top or under is either the receiving or the producing
So I don't know if that happens there too.
And the second thing that I wanted to mention is that each student in Honduras is a Spanish speaking country but there is also a lot of different peoples and especially in that area.
I don't have very recent information about Honduras, but in Nicaragua the Creole people and the Miskitu people interact quite a bit.
and I think that my information is old on Honduras but it was the same thing
but I don't know if that is happening on Roatan or not but it's something to take into account

Ben: yeah I mean one of the interesting
things about roatan is is that it's a
got a large Garifuna population as well
and one of the deafblind people that we
met had a child with the Garifuna person
as well so there is some interesting yet
complex cultural interactions

Audience: Hi I was just wondering if you've come across any non-manual signs and how those might manifest in tactile modality

Ben: Yes, certainly there are lots of non-manual
signs let me think there's a sign for horse
that we came across which was it has
both manual and a non-manual component and it was [making sounds] yeah I don't know the
answer to how are those kind of things
manifested in the tactile modality but
something we want to look at

Audience: you know
I have worked as a tactile interpreter and I
noticed that you know their families
that have usher syndrome there are accustom to
having people sit in different
locations but I think if you're in a
more professional situation you would
sit face to face but at home it's very
different because I think this is more
clearly influenced by home sign

Ben: that's right

Moderator: well if there are no other questions I
say take a break and see you at the
closing