Sign language law in the United Kingdom (UK) illustrates how symbolic law can fail to deliver substantive rights. Across the UK's four nations-Scotland, England, Northern Ireland, and Wales-sign language law has taken divergent forms, but with common limitations. Scotland's British Sign Language (BSL) (Scotland) Act (2015), described as a "barking dog that never bites" when it was just a bill, created national and local planning duties but has not transformed access to education, services, or justice. England's BSL Act 2022, a "caged lion," keeps transformation in check by confining itself to reporting and as-yet-unpublished guidance through descriptive reports and formulaic five-year departmental plans. Northern Ireland, a "steadfast elk," has introduced legislative provision for BSL and Irish Sign Language (ISL), reflecting resilience and a slow, steady approach amid political instability. Wales, the "roarless dragon," has introduced a draft BSL bill with duties on ministers and public bodies and a statutory BSL adviser after initial governmental resistance and reticence by the Welsh deaf community, suggesting the dragon is now breathing fire on all fronts. Using a multimethod legal research framework, this article integrates doctrinal, sociolegal, and comparative approaches to show that while sign language visibility has increased, accountability, enforce-ability, and measurable outcomes remain absent. Without clear duties, independent oversight, and sustainable funding, UK sign lan-guage law risks remaining a matter of form rather than substance. The article concludes that a rights-based approach is required if BSL and ISL recognition is to move beyond symbolism and establish a framework that secures rights for deaf individuals through equal access, resources, and meaningful participation.
Individuals fluent in both a sign language and a spoken language are called bimodal bilinguals. Their language experience has been associated with the production of a number of different bilingual linguistic phenomena, including code-switching and code-blending, and unique patterns of co-speech gesture production. The current study is the first to systematically investigate the presence of bilingual language phenomena and co-speech gesture production in the spoken productions of hearing Polish bimodal bilinguals fluent in Polish Sign Language (PJM) and spoken Polish through a psycholinguistic experiment. We aim to investigate bimodal bilinguals in a situation in which they are expected to actively control languages, strictly separate them, and only use the language designated in the task (language production with external constraints). Seven hearing Polish bimodal bilinguals participated in the study, which involved completing a self-assessment questionnaire and performing four narrative language tasks-two in PJM and two in spoken Polish-each requiring the use of only one language. Participants were explicitly instructed to maintain strict language separation, with each task requiring the exclusive use of the designated language as specified at the outset of each task. Their spoken productions were systematically analyzed for the presence of meaningful hand movements (lexicalized sign language signs and manual gestures). The results show that even though Polish bimodal bilinguals claim to engage in code-mixing practices, in an experimental setup where language control is enforced by external constraints, they did not articulate any lexicalized PJM signs. The only meaningful manual actions identified in the data sample were manual gestures, with nonreferential gestures (beats) occurring twice as often as referential gestures (deictic, iconic, and metaphoric). The lack of language mixing and the observed tendencies in gesture production are tentatively explained by the participants' language experiences, language control skills, and internalized language ideologies.
This article examines the language beliefs of signers of the severely endangered Finland-Swedish Sign Language (finlandssvenskt teckenspr & aring;k, FSTS). The study focuses on how signers perceive FSTS to be a linguistic entity and how they relate to the notion of responsibility in supporting language vitality. The data consist of video recordings of 14 FSTS signers drawing, describing, and discussing language portraits, and the material is analyzed through the theoretical lenses of language-making and responsibility. The results show that signers assign high emotional value to FSTS and express a strong desire to use their language. At the same time, they describe various obstacles that hinder their ability to support language vitality. For example, younger signers describe limited language skills and lack of opportunities to use and develop the language, while older signers express doubts about their own agency, reflected in their lack of confidence to take action. When study participants describe FSTS as a perceived linguistic entity, different naming practices of the language emerge. Changes in FSTS naming practices across generations of signers reveal the process of language-making by illustrating how FSTS has become a named language in its own right. The study also highlights the need to pay more attention to the concepts of language-making and responsibility to better understand the role that beliefs play in language revitalization.
Quantification in natural language is typically categorized into three types: negative, universal, and existential quantifiers (von Fintel & Heim, 2011). While quantification has been extensively studied in spoken languages, its expression in signed languages-utilizing space, classifiers, and nonmanual features such as facial expressions and mouth gestures (Nendauni, 2021), remains underexplored. This study examines quantification in Israeli Sign Language (ISL), a relatively young sign language which emerged with the formation of the deaf community in Israel about 90 years ago (Meir & Sandler, 2008). Only one other study (Kocab et al., 2022) has looked at quantification in a young sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (LSN), and it demonstrated that LSN signers employ all three quantifier types from the early stages of language emergence. Adopting a similar quantification elicitation task to the one used by Kocab et al. (2022), this study recruited 15 ISL signers. The findings of the present study reveal that ISL signers utilize classifiers and mouth gestures or no mouth movement for existential quantifiers, lexical signs and mouthing for universal quantifiers, and lexical signs and mouth gestures for negative quantifiers. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how grammatical categories like quantification are encoded in young sign languages.
