Chapter 3. Exploring sign-writing contact and multilingualism in the Norwegian Deaf community

Abstract

In this chapter, we detail the on-going work related to the Norwegian Sign Language Corpus and lexical database (Norwegian Signbank). In particular, we highlight the corpus’ interactional focus and discuss its implications for a description of Norwegian Sign Language grammar and lexicon. We then present an initial study that maps out the different types of fingerspelling (one type of sign-writing contact), observed in the corpus, focusing on non-lexicalized forms. Two analyses were performed to investigate whether fingerspelling is affected by sociolinguistic factors and principles of Audience Design (Bell 1984). Basing this descriptive work on data from the corpus facilitates a better understanding of how these language contact forms contribute to expressions of social identity and illustrates one way that Norwegian signers leverage their multilingualism for meaning-making in conversation.