In August, we went to a conference on “Sign Language Contact, Variation and Change” based at the University of Birmingham: https://sites.google.com/view/slcvc-workshop/home. This was a chance to share the findings from the Corpus of ISL with deaf and hearing people in the UK. Sara presented onstage in International Sign. She described her PhD research based on what deaf ISL signers collectively talked about in the interviews. Rose presented in British Sign Language about the Corpus and about contact between ISL and other sign languages and spoken languages in Israel – the findings show that variation in different parts of Israel (e.g., signs for “hospital” in Haifa and Tel Aviv) is in decline and younger people are using less variation than older signers.
Sara also presented her most recent research about variation of signs which are “socially sensitive” and how they are undergoing change. Socially sensitive signs include signs such as “gay”, “China” or “Jewish” which often have two different variants, sometimes one is more acceptable than the other and this causes sudden change. Sara described the changes she has found in ISL to a captive audience.
