Plains Indian Sign Language

While there are many names for the language, Hand Talk is the preferred term in Indigenous communities. The term is a calque of the language's own name for itself. Other names for the language are used, like Plains Sign Talk and Plains Indian Sign Language (the latter favored exclusively in the United States), but these are erroneous as Hand Talk extends beyond the Great Plains into the Northeast Woodlands, the Great Basin, and beyond. Indeed, as McKay-Cody writes (2019), Hand Talk itself should be considered a family of closely related languages. Whilst the name "Hand Talk" is a direct translation from the language itself, each nation has their own word or name for Hand Talk in their respective oral languages: == History ==

Hand Talk's history is intimately associated with both ancient and recent petroglyphs of the continent, These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541. Signing may have started in the southern parts of North America, perhaps in northern Mexico or Texas, and only spread into the Plains in recent times, though this suspicion may be an artifact of European observation. It is known that there is a complex of Maya sign languages called Meemul Chʼaabʼal or Meemul Tziij in the Kʼicheʼ language, but it is unknown to what extent Meemul Tziij has affected Hand Talk. The Northwest is home to Plateau Sign Language, which is either a single language or a family of sign languages spoken by the local nations. It is also unknown how associated Plateau Sign Language is with Hand Talk, but it is probable that they are related. Although it is still spoken, especially by the Ktunaxa, the Plateau nations historically shifted to using Chinook Jargon instead. In recent years, the Oneida Nation has taken steps to revive their sign language. Historically, the nations of the Northeast Woodlands, like the Haudenosaunee, spoke a variant of Hand Talk. The Oneida Sign Language Project officially began in 2016, and more signs are being added to this day. ==Geography==

Sign language use has been documented across speakers of at least 37 oral languages in twelve families, spread across an area of over 2.6 million square kilometres (1 million square miles). Southwest Hand Talk is spoken by the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Pueblo peoples. However, amongst the Navajo and Keres people, there are two unrelated sign languages also spoken: Keresan Sign Language and, by a Navajo clan with a large number of deaf members, Navajo Family Sign. Likewise, Plateau Sign Language may or may not be related to Hand Talk. ==Writing==

Hand Talk's writing system is picture-writing in the form of petroglyphs, pictographs, and hieroglyphs. It is one of the few sign languages with a written form. As McKay-Cody writes (2019) of petroglyphic rock writing: "Although not necessarily linear, the pieces are pictographic narratives." Cherokee-Greek author Thomas King dispels the myth that "all literature in the Americas [was only] oral" in his book The Truth About Stories, a Native Narrative. "In fact, pictographic systems (petroglyphs, pictographs, and hieroglyphics) were used by a great many [nations] to commemorate events and to record stories." Rock writing served a variety of purposes, from narratives to marking territory to locator signs akin to modern-day road signage, the latter of which would be to indicate water sources, trails through canyons, and flash-flood zone warnings. As Hand Talk is a visual-spatial language, its writing is similarly non-linear and visual. In a study on writing in Ute Country (Núuchi Tuvupu), McKay-Cody points out that since the Hand Talk spoken in the Great Basin positions the past to the left and future to the right (as opposed to American Sign Language which positions the past and future as behind and in front of the signer, respectively), rock writing of the region often similarly represent narratives chronologically from left-to-right. In contrast, Plains and Uto-Aztecan nations sign, and thus read and write, the past and future from right-to-left, such as the Lakota winter counts. Elevation, size, and direction of individual petroglyphs also encode semantics such as temporal, spatial, and other concepts. The logographic picture writing of Hand Talk blurs the lines between art and writing. Many signs were written in the way they were signed. For example, the word for "hungry" involves an upward-facing flat hand cutting across one's stomach. Written, its glyph is of a human with a line through their stomach. However, deviating from the "standard" glyph, stylistic versions could also be drawn that are still readable to a Hand Talk speaker. Hand Talk was not isolated to petroglyphic rock writing. Anishinaabe wiigwaasabakoon and Lakota winter counts are examples of writings on birch bark scrolls and buffalo hides, respectively. It is unknown what relation, if any, the hieroglyphic Mi'kmaw suckerfish script has with Hand Talk. During the era of colonization, Plains Sign Language was also written on paper. For example, a letter from the parents of an interned Kiowa student, Belo Cozad, was sent to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1890 from his parents. ==Phonology==

La Mont West, working under the guidance of Alfred Kroeber and Charles F. Voegelin, was an early pioneer in not only the phonological analysis of Plains Sign Language but sign language phonology in general. In his unpublished dissertation, he developed a notation system and analysed Plains Sign Language as having eighty-two phonemes, which he called kinemes, each being able to be broken down further in terms of features. He analyzed signs as morphologically complex that others such as William Stokoe would analyze as monomorphemic, and many of his findings were later rediscovered. His study of Plains Sign Language was taking place at the same time as Stokoe's seminal studies of ASL phonology. • Direction – paralleling vowels, there are eight distinctive directions, including the “directions” of either touching or being parallel to the referent. It can be combined with handshape to designate pointing or facing; with the referent, where it surfaces as placement; or with movement (i.e. motion dynamics), where it specifies the direction of movement. • Handshape – paralleling consonants, nine basic handshapes can be rounded or unrounded to form a total of 18 distinct handshapes. • Referent – numbering 40, these account for the greater phonemic inventory of Plains Sign Language compared to most spoken languages. This can be a part of the hand, head, leg, body, or an external referent. • Motion-patterns – there are four motion-patterns consisting of the shape of any movement. Most signs are one-handed, including all function signs, and these one-handed signs can be divided into static signs or those with movement. Two-handed signs are limited to signs where both hands are still, where one hand stays still and the other moves, or where both hands move. When both hands move, they move together in either parallel or intersecting motion. These constraints parallel the Symmetry and Dominance Conditions later found in ASL. The Symmetry Condition requires that two-handed signs in which both hands move must be symmetrical in motion, while the Dominance Condition says that in two-handed signs involving two different handshapes, the passive hand is limited to certain movements and handshapes. Preliminary analysis has shown that Plains Sign Language seems to adhere to these conditions, and also favours unmarked handshapes. West describes extensive allophony, the conditioning environments of which can be highly specific. Prosody Users of Plains Sign Language show extensive prosodic structure, which West divided into syllable-like packages and sub-packages, word-like individual signs, sentence-like phrases, and paragraph-like utterances. Except for the package and in stark contrast to most deaf sign languages, where signs often flow freely into each other, the boundaries of each of these prosodic units are consistently marked with one of three junctures: The paragraph-final juncture exclusively marks the beginnings and ends of complete utterances, each having approximately the length and content of a paragraph. It may be dropped at the beginning of an utterance. The paragraph- and phrase-final junctures can be used interchangeably between signs. The paragraph-final juncture is more frequently used to separate list items and complete, sentence-like ideas, while the phrase-final juncture is preferred after incomplete ideas or dangling clauses and is more likely to appear everywhere else. Any signs not separated by either the paragraph- or phrase-final juncture are near-universally separated by the sign-final juncture, as well as packages within an open compound, where multiple signs are used as a unit to refer to some idea or thing. Paragraph- and phrase-final junctures are extremely rare within open compounds. The largest units not separated by a juncture at all are unit signs, which can be a single package, a package and a handshape or terminal referent, a repeated package, or a closed compound, where multiple signs form a new sign. ==See also==