28th January 2026: Dr Rose Stamp

Spring semester, week 1

1.10-2pm

The What, Why, and How of Lexical Variation in Sign Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Three Unrelated Sign Languages

Dr Rose Stamp (The University of Birmingham)

Sign languages are known for displaying variation at the lexical level, both anecdotally and empirically. Like spoken languages, this lexical variation in sign languages is systematically constrained by social (and linguistic) factors, such as the signer’s age and region. In this study, we consider what processes of language change are underway? With evidence from British Sign Language (BSL) and Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and two different methodological approaches, we show that there is evidence of dialect levelling, with a decline in regional variation and instead signers are adopting supra-local variants. To examine why this change is taking place, we test whether accommodation may be the catalyst for dialect levelling. Through examining signer’s interactions in a picture-matching task, we show that while younger signers accommodate more than older signers, the amount of accommodation is minimal, suggesting that other factors may also play a role in language change. Finally, we examine lexical variation across three unrelated sign languages of varying sizes. We ask: How does community structure affect the degree of lexical variation? We demonstrate that while larger sign languages exhibit more lexical variation than smaller sign languages, there is less variation at a sub-community level, within clusters. Crucially, we claim that an important distinction should be made between variation at a community-level (“global”) and variation within a community (“local”).

This session takes place in Room 3.58 of the John Percival Building [venue currently TBC] at Cardiff University or join us via Teams using this link.