Symposium on the History and Genetics of Sign Language Communities 

This Symposium is jointly sponsored by the Department of Communication, UC San Diego and Centre Alexandre Koyre, CNRS (with EHESS - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and MNHN - the French National Museum of Natural History). 

Presentations are in person and online viewing will be made available (link with registration). 

Attendance is free with registration.

Over the past decade, research on sign languages has uncovered numerous newly identified sign language communities worldwide. Unlike large national sign languages, most are small, yet their widespread and recurrent emergence highlights a fundamental truth: language is multimodal, and nascent sign languages can emerge whenever conditions allow.

This Symposium aims to bring together researchers to examine how sign languages emerge, persist, thrive, and disappear. Recent studies on home signers, family sign languages, and village sign languages have revealed the global scope of signing communities and the genetic factors influencing their development. 

Earlier accounts, including ancient descriptions of deafness and possible signing communities dating back to at least the 6th century BCE, suggest that such communities have arisen and disappeared throughout prehistory. Historians and linguists have traced self-reports and documents from deaf communities dating from the 18th- and 19th-century Europe and the U.S. 

Finally, studying the genetics and linguistics of signing populations may offer insights into language emergence in prehistory, during which signing languages could have evolved in parallel with, but separately from, spoken languages.