Sign Languages of the World

Date of Lecture: Thursday, November 11, 2021, 1:15 - 2:35 pm

Location of Lecture: Wang Center Lecture Hall 2

Lecture Abstract

Among all creatures, only people have language. Individual languages differ from one another, sometimes greatly: Every human society has its own language. The urge to communicate among humans is so great that when, for whatever reason, the members of a group of humans do not have speech, they will create a visual language. Sign languages are found around the world, these languages have little or no relation to the spoken languages around them, and the sign languages may differ greatly from each other. In this presentation, I will discuss a variety of sign languages from around the world, large and small, old and new. ASL (American Sign Language) Interpretation will be provided.

About the Lecturer

Mark Aronoff is a Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. The major focus of his research is linguistic morphology, the internal structure of words. For the last twenty years, he has been a member of a group studying Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language that emerged among a small group of Deaf individuals in a village in the Negev desert in modern Israel. Professor Aronoff is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Linguistic Society of America.