PROJECT

The project started informally in 2009 supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands). . In 2013, the project got support from the CIESAS and the INALI; Since, the documentation project has been increasing and produced scientific contributions. Currently, the research project is coordinated by Dr. Le Guen. The research project has documented YMSL in several villages in the Yucatec peninsula. First, Chicán and Nohkop but more recent investigations extended to Trascorral y Cepeda Peraza.

The overall aim of the research is to understand and explain the similarities that exist between Chicán and Nohkop at the linguistic level. To accomplish the research team makes use of new technologies handled by a group of experts and speakers, both Mayan speakers as well as YMSL signers (deaf and Bilingual-Bimodal).

AN INNOVATIVE PROJECT

The project aims at improving Mexico’s scientific development in general, and to various linguistic communities in particular; as registered digital collections show evidence of an extreme contact between this native language and the Yucatec Maya spoken language as linguistic and cultural heritage.



NEW LANGUAGES

The LSMY’s documentation contributes to linguistic documentation and to the topologic description of world languages. This is a great input to sign language linguistics and linguistics in general. The emergency from distinct sign languages in a spontaneous manner and isolated rural contexts are, no doubt, a unique opportunity to better understand the processes that led to the human language emergence.

SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE RESEARCH

The recognition of emergent sign languages and their comparison in various communities allows providing potential answers to fundamental questions like: What are the universal traits of human language? Which language structure characteristics distinguish languages with visual-spatial modalities? And how the socio-cultural context influences the emergence of sign languages?
PROJECT PHILOSOPHY

There is no better way to conduct the documentation and LSMY’s description than to incorporate signer persons and its users. That is why the research team has had worked very closely with the communities, sharing everyday activities; making use of participant ethnography, doing long and/or frequent fieldwork. In such a way, signers have been of great importance and they have been integrated to the research team, conducting video recording, transcription, and translation.

HOW WE DO ACHIEVE IT?

We dedicated a period of time to members' preparation, giving them tutoring on the ELAN’s software usage, basic linguistic lessons, and various courses regarding the utilization of recording materials.
As a way to fully demonstrate community members’ integration in the scientific process, members of the communities themselves featured lectures in the First Coloquio Internacional de las Lenguas Emergentes (First International Colloquium of Emergent Sign Languages) supported by INALI, which took place in Mexico City, September 2015. This experience was a success and young members of the project as well as students were able to clearly present innovative research but also answer questions and comments from international and senior researchers.
Finally, we want to emphasize among the members of the project, we utilize Spanish the least possible, not only because the team incorporates elderly people and signers, as native speakers do not consider Spanish as a common language, but also it is a way of promote and make visible the two indigenous languages (LSMY an spoken maya); In some respect, it also is a way to avoid any form of colonialism in which researchers would impose a language that is not the one of the collaborators.

PROJECT CONTRIBUTIONS



Documentation in different communities (initially Chicán and Nohkop but more recently Trascorral, Cepeda, and Chemax) has allowed us to find elements to understand.

Quotable gestures and iconic gestures
Le Guen et al. (2012, 2020) propose that multimodal communication extensively used among the Yucatec Mayas along with a positive attitude towards deafness facilitates the creation of emerging signed languages.

In various dissertations (published and in the process), it shows that conventionalized gestures as “quotable gestures” or “emblem gestures”, are those gestures that maintain a form and stable meaning inside the lexicon. The comparative exercise of the lexicon in different communities has enabled us to see that this whole of gestures not only represents to both communities the foundation of LSMY but between them, there are multiple similarities.
Actually, data show that, potentially, most if not all quotable gestures will be recruited to create a basic lexicon in any sign language that will be developed among the Mayas (although it is worth mention that many of these gestures are not exclusive to the Mayas but are in use among many indigenous and non-indigenous groups in Mexico and Guatemala).

On the other hand, there are also many iconic gestures, that we consider as semi-conventionalized, and also help in creating sign lexicon. Iconic gestures have an obivous relationship (culturally) between their form and the referent they represent. Though conventionalization, these gestures, become signs in the LSMY.
Actually, data show that, potentially, most if not all quotable gestures will be recruited to create a basic lexicon in any sign language that will be developed among the Mayas (although it is worth mention that many of these gestures are not exclusive to the Mayas but are in use among many indigenous and non-indigenous groups in Mexico and Guatemala).
On the other hand, there are also many iconic gestures, that we consider as semi-conventionalized, and also help in creating sign lexicon. Iconic gestures have an obivous relationship (culturally) between their form and the referent they represent. Though conventionalization, these gestures, become signs in the LSMY.
Community Strategies for the Creation of Signs
Even when a variation does exist between communities, due to the absence of common conventionalization processes, it is remarkable that in many cases we witness similar strategies that come to create identical signs or that, at least, allows inter-comprehension between deaf signers and speakers.

A study conducted by Josefina Safar and Rodrigo Petatillo shows how much gestures from speakers are similar to the sign language and how speakers of Yucatec Maya and signers of the LSMY rely on a similar intuition when creating non-verbal signs (Safar, y Petatillo, 2020).
The work of Josefina Safar (Ph.D. student in Stockholm University, Sweden supervised by J. Mesh and O. Le Guen, 2020) compared variants from different communities in which LSMY is used and compared lexicon variations between semantic domains.

In her PhD Thesis, she shows how certain domains that are not gesturally conventionalized among the Yucatec Maya speakers, like numbers and colors for instance, and how this leads to different strategies in the creation of lexicon between communities and within the same community.
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