Introduction: The First Wave of Sign Language Research—Selected Memoirs

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• Introduction:The First Wave of Sign Language Research—Selected Memoirs
• Penny Boyes Braem (bio), Virginia Volterra (bio), Robbin Battison (bio), Nancy Frishberg (bio), and Carol Padden (bio)

Why a Special Issue?

Fifty years after William Stokoe founded Sign Language Studies (SLS) in 1972, we have reason to give thanks for a half-century of research and discovery, and to reflect on its origins. Because much has changed since those early days. And many stories have not yet been told.

The idea for a special issue arose when two of us (Boyes Braem and Volterra) wrote a short memoir relating our first steps into the nascent field of sign language research about fifty years ago. The SLS [End Page 185] editors then proposed expanding it to include memoirs from other pioneering researchers, which would also align with the journal's fiftieth anniversary.

Thus, this special issue was born, with Frishberg, Padden, and Battison joining Boyes Braem and Volterra on the editorial team. We gathered twenty-three contributions from early researchers of twelve different sign languages in North America and Europe, as well as a short report on sign languages in six Asian countries and Hawai'i.

We asked each of these contributors to describe their first steps in beginning research on the sign language in their country, and to tell it in their own way. They were also encouraged to mention any special conditions they faced as they began their work.

The resulting collection serves as historical documentation of how a new research field is born. We believe that the personal details and variety of motivations and settings will interest a wide range of readers—not only the veterans of the field who will recognize their pioneering friends, but also younger researchers seeking insights into the roots of sign language linguistics and related fields.

Scope and Limitations

To ensure the issue's feasibility, we primarily invited researchers who published descriptions of sign languages before 1980 in the United States and before 1990 in Europe. Our goal was not to document how the field has changed over fifty years, but simply to describe the startup phases. Although this cutoff may exclude some early researchers, and not everyone we invited could participate, the collection still offers a representative glimpse into the origins of this field. Following this Introduction is a short list of our contributors, in which they describe why they first became involved in sign language research.

Sadly, it was too late for some very influential researchers to contribute, as they are no longer with us—among them William Stokoe, Bernard Tervoort, Paul Jouison, Ursula Bellugi, Edward Klima, Harlan Lane, Mary Brennan, Inger Ahlgren, Harry Markowicz, Bernard Mottez, and Elena Pizzuto. Although biographies and memoirs already exist for some of these pioneers, we asked contributors who worked closely with any of them to share their memories about them. [End Page 186]

How and Why Did Early Researchers Begin?

Perhaps not surprisingly, nearly half of the contributing researchers became curious about signing from some early experience in an educational setting involving either deaf children in schools or deaf students in institutes of higher education. And more than half of the contributors had been aware of sign language, either because they grew up with families or friends who signed or are themselves deaf native signers. Many others found their way to sign language research through academic curiosity or other serendipitous channels.

These articles make it clear that studies of sign language structure were highly intertwined with sign language acquisition, education, or interpreting, with many early linguistic studies being written by people influenced by their experiences in these other fields. This has also been reported by Maher (1996) for Stokoe as well as by others for many other sign language researchers, for example, Vermeerbergen (2006), McBurney (2012), Woll (2013), Battison (2016, 2000), Hulst (2022), and in articles on sign language and gesture studies, such as Kendon (2002) and Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox (1995).

American vs. European Settings

The academic and social conditions facing these first researchers often differed greatly from one country to the next. For example, in Italy and Switzerland, where local deaf signing communities were smaller and fewer than in the United States...