Plains Indian Sign Language
Encyclopedia
The Plains Indian sign languages (PISL) are various manually coded language
s used, or formerly used, by various Native Americans of the Great Plains
of the United States of America and Canada
. The best known is Plains Standard Sign Language, a contact language (international auxiliary language
) used between these peoples.
in 1541.
As a result of several factors, including the massive depopulation
and the Americanization
of Native North Americans, the number of PISL signers declined from European arrival onward. In 1885, it was estimated that there were over 110,000 “sign-talking Indians”, including Blackfoot
, Cheyenne
, Sioux
, Kiowa
and Arapaho
. By the 1960s, there remained a “very small percentage of this number”. There are few PISL signers today.
W.P. Clark who served in the United States Army
on the northern plains during the Indian Wars
was the author of The Indian Sign Language, first published in 1885, The Indian Sign Language with Brief Explanatory Notes of the Gestures Taught Deaf-Mutes in Our Institutions and a Description of Some of the Peculiar Laws, Customs, Myths, Superstitions, Ways of Living, Codes of Peace and War Signs, remains in print.
Each nation used a distinct manually coded language
, as was the case in aboriginal Australia. In addition, there was a trade pidgin
that may have never been extensively used, or was only used by a well-traveled elite. This contact language may be distinguished as Plains Standard SL, as opposed to the generic term Plains Indian SL for the various ethnic forms. These were reportedly not used by the deaf, who used home sign
instead.
Signing may have started in the south, 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. Sign, or at least contact sign, spread to the Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Caddo after their removal to Oklahoma. Via the Crow, it replaced the divergent Plateau Sign Language
among the eastern nations that used it, the Coeur d’Alene, Sanpoil, Okanagan, Thompson, Lakes, Shuswap, and Coleville in British Columbia, with western nations shifting instead to Chinook Jargon
.
The various nations with attested use, divided by language family, are:
A distinct form is also reported from the Wyandot of Ohio.
It should be noted that there are sometimes other considerations that can be added into signs. “Language Files” shows that these include things such as facial features and one-handedness versus two-handedness in signs. However, it is generally accepted that these function more a suprasegmentals, and that the four parameters listed above are the more crucial elements of various signs.
One fundamental difference between spoken and signed languages is that while in spoken languages’ phones occur separately; occurring one after the other, signed languages phones all occur at the same time. For example, if one makes a handshape, it will, by necessity, exist in a certain location, have a certain movement or lack thereof, and have a certain orientation. For this reason it must be understood that while the parameters of sign are listed separately below, they would always be found co-occurring with the other parameters to make up a single sign phone.
Manually Coded Language
Manually coded languages are representations of spoken languages in a gestural-visual form; that is, "sign language" versions of spoken languages...
s used, or formerly used, by various Native Americans of the Great Plains
Plains Indians
The Plains Indians are the Indigenous peoples who live on the plains and rolling hills of the Great Plains of North America. Their colorful equestrian culture and resistance to White domination have made the Plains Indians an archetype in literature and art for American Indians everywhere.Plains...
of the United States of America and Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
. The best known is Plains Standard Sign Language, a contact language (international auxiliary language
International auxiliary language
An international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
) used between these peoples.
History
PISL's antecedents, if any, are unknown, due to lack of written records, but the earliest records of contact between Europeans and Native Americans of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the Europeans' arrival there. These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and CoronadoFrancisco Vásquez de Coronado
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado y Luján was a Spanish conquistador, who visited New Mexico and other parts of what are now the southwestern United States between 1540 and 1542...
in 1541.
As a result of several factors, including the massive depopulation
Population history of American indigenous peoples
The population figures for Indigenous peoples in the Americas before the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus have proven difficult to establish and rely on archaeological data and written records from European settlers...
and the Americanization
Americanization (of Native Americans)
The Americanization of Native Americans was an assimilation effort by the United States to transform Native American culture to European-American culture between the years of 1790–1920. George Washington and Henry Knox were first to propose, in an American context, the cultural transformation of...
of Native North Americans, the number of PISL signers declined from European arrival onward. In 1885, it was estimated that there were over 110,000 “sign-talking Indians”, including Blackfoot
Blackfoot
The Blackfoot Confederacy or Niitsítapi is the collective name of three First Nations in Alberta and one Native American tribe in Montana....
, Cheyenne
Cheyenne
Cheyenne are a Native American people of the Great Plains, who are of the Algonquian language family. The Cheyenne Nation is composed of two united tribes, the Só'taeo'o and the Tsétsêhéstâhese .The Cheyenne are thought to have branched off other tribes of Algonquian stock inhabiting lands...
, Sioux
Sioux
The Sioux are Native American and First Nations people in North America. The term can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation's many language dialects...
, Kiowa
Kiowa
The Kiowa are a nation of American Indians and indigenous people of the Great Plains. They migrated from the northern plains to the southern plains in the late 17th century. In 1867, the Kiowa moved to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma...
and Arapaho
Arapaho
The Arapaho are a tribe of Native Americans historically living on the eastern plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Sioux. Arapaho is an Algonquian language closely related to Gros Ventre, whose people are seen as an early...
. By the 1960s, there remained a “very small percentage of this number”. There are few PISL signers today.
W.P. Clark who served in the United States Army
United States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
on the northern plains during the Indian Wars
Indian Wars
American Indian Wars is the name used in the United States to describe a series of conflicts between American settlers or the federal government and the native peoples of North America before and after the American Revolutionary War. The wars resulted from the arrival of European colonizers who...
was the author of The Indian Sign Language, first published in 1885, The Indian Sign Language with Brief Explanatory Notes of the Gestures Taught Deaf-Mutes in Our Institutions and a Description of Some of the Peculiar Laws, Customs, Myths, Superstitions, Ways of Living, Codes of Peace and War Signs, remains in print.
Geography
Sign language use has been documented across speakers of at least 37 spoken languages in twelve families, spread across an area of over 1 million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers). In recent history, it was highly developed among the Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa, among others, and remains strong among the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho.Each nation used a distinct manually coded language
Manually Coded Language
Manually coded languages are representations of spoken languages in a gestural-visual form; that is, "sign language" versions of spoken languages...
, as was the case in aboriginal Australia. In addition, there was a trade pidgin
Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
that may have never been extensively used, or was only used by a well-traveled elite. This contact language may be distinguished as Plains Standard SL, as opposed to the generic term Plains Indian SL for the various ethnic forms. These were reportedly not used by the deaf, who used home sign
Home sign
Home sign is the gestural communication system developed by a deaf child who lacks input from a language model in the family...
instead.
Signing may have started in the south, 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. Sign, or at least contact sign, spread to the Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Caddo after their removal to Oklahoma. Via the Crow, it replaced the divergent Plateau Sign Language
Plateau Sign Language
Plateau Sign Language, or Old Plateau Sign Language, is a poorly attested sign language historically used in British Columbia. It is not clear if it was a regional variant of Plains Standard Sign Language, the contact pidgin of the Great Plains, or a separate trade language indigenous to the...
among the eastern nations that used it, the Coeur d’Alene, Sanpoil, Okanagan, Thompson, Lakes, Shuswap, and Coleville in British Columbia, with western nations shifting instead to Chinook Jargon
Chinook Jargon
Chinook Jargon originated as a pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest, and spread during the 19th century from the lower Columbia River, first to other areas in modern Oregon and Washington, then British Columbia and as far as Alaska, sometimes taking on characteristics of a creole language...
.
The various nations with attested use, divided by language family, are:
- PimanPiman languagesPiman refers a group of languages within the Uto-Aztecan family that are spoken by ethnic groups spanning from Arizona in the north to Durango, Mexico in the south.The Piman languages are as follows :...
: Pima, Papago, and continuing into northern Mexico - isolates of the Texas coast: Coahuilteco, TonkawaTonkawaThe Tickanwa•tic Tribe , better known as the Tonkawa , are a Native American people indigenous to present-day Oklahoma and Texas. They once spoke the now-extinct Tonkawa language believed to have been a language isolate not related to any other indigenous tongues...
, KarankawaKarankawaKarankawa were a group of Native American peoples, now extinct as a tribal group, who played a pivotal part in early Texas history....
, AtakapaAtakapaThe Atakapan people are a Southeastern culture of Native American tribes who spoke Atakapa and historically lived along the Gulf of Mexico. They called themselves the Ishak, pronounced "ee-SHAK", which translates as "The People". Although the people were decimated by infectious disease after... - Yuman: Maricopa
- NumicNumic languagesNumic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, and southern Great Plains. The word Numic comes from the cognate word in all Numic languages for "person." For...
: Paiute, Ute, Comanche, Shoshone - Kiowa
- TanoanTanoan languagesTanoan is a family of languages spoken in New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.Most of the languages – Tiwa , Tewa, and Towa – are spoken in the Pueblos of New Mexico and were the ones first given the collective name Tanoan, while Kiowa is spoken mostly in southwestern...
: Taos PuebloTaos PuebloTaos Pueblo is an ancient pueblo belonging to a Taos speaking Native American tribe of Pueblo people. It is approximately 1000 years old and lies about north of the modern city of Taos, New Mexico, USA... - Zuni Pueblo
- CaddoanCaddoan languagesThe Caddoan languages are a family of Native American languages. They are spoken by Native Americans in parts of the Great Plains of the central United States, from North Dakota south to Oklahoma.-Family division:...
: Wichita, Pawnee, Arikara - AthabaskanAthabaskan languagesAthabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...
: Apache (Mescalero, Lipan, Jicarilla, and Kiowa Apache), Sarcee, Beaver - AlgonquianAlgonquian languagesThe Algonquian languages also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Native American languages which includes most of the languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin dialect of the Ojibwe language, which is a...
: Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Cree, Ojibwa - KutenaiKutenai languageThe Kutenai language is named after and is spoken by some of the Kootenai Native American/First Nations people who are indigenous to the area of North America that is now Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia....
- SiouanSiouan languagesThe Western Siouan languages, also called Siouan proper or simply Siouan, are a Native American language family of North America, and the second largest indigenous language family in North America, after Algonquian...
: Mandan, Crow, Hidatsa, Omaha, Osage, Assinibion, Ponca, Oto, Sioux (Teton, Yankton, Yanktonai, Santee) - SahaptianSahaptian languagesSahaptian is a sub-grouping of two languages of the Plateau Penutian family spoken by Native American peoples in the Columbia Plateau region of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho in the northwestern United States.-Family division:Sahaptian includes 2 languages*Kittitas *Klickitat*Nez Percé**Nez Percé...
: Nez Perce, Sahaptin, Umatilla, Palus - Cayuse
- Salish: Kalispel, Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, Spokane, Sanpoil (shifted from the distinct Plateau Sign LanguagePlateau Sign LanguagePlateau Sign Language, or Old Plateau Sign Language, is a poorly attested sign language historically used in British Columbia. It is not clear if it was a regional variant of Plains Standard Sign Language, the contact pidgin of the Great Plains, or a separate trade language indigenous to the...
)
A distinct form is also reported from the Wyandot of Ohio.
Phonology
There is some debate as to whether Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) is actually a single language with various dialects or whether there are multiple languages. In "Hand Talk", Jeffrey Davis, author of “Hand Talk,” asserts that there is only one language, with dialectal variations. PISL was formerly used as a "lingua franca" by the Native Americans of the Plains to communicate between tribes and also to communicate between members of the same tribe. It was and is used by both deaf and hearing individuals. Thus, considering its status as a “lingua franca” it can be accepted that PISL is indeed a language.Parameters
It is commonly accepted amongst linguists who study sign language, though not widely known to the general public, that all signed languages have certain parameters that are used to define their most basic parts. This may be compared to how spoken languages have certain parameters—place of articulation, manner, highness, frontness, etc.--to define their phones. Signed language phones, as they are called, are defined by the following parameters, as explained in “Language Files”:- Location—this involves the spacial placement of a sign. Signs may change meaning when placed in a different location, for example, in front of the face as opposed to in front of the torso.
- Movement—this involves, as implied, the way the hands move when forming the sign. For example, in PISL, the signs AFTERNOON and MID-DAY form minimal pairs as they are both formed exactly the same, the only difference being that MID-DAY is stationary and AFTERNOON moves from above the head to the side in an arching motion.
- Handshape—as implied, each sign takes on a certain shape in the hand, called a handshape. The handshapes of signs are a very key parameter. For example, the signs YES and I-KNOW are the same in all parameters except for the handshape; in YES the hand makes the PISL J shape, and in I-KNOW the hand takes the L shape.
- Orientation—this refers to the orientation of the palm. This is clearly seen in the PISL signs ABOVE and ADD. Both involve having the left hand act as a base from which the right hand rises, and both have the same location, movement, and handshapes; however, in ABOVE, the non-dominant hand is palm down, and in ADD the non-dominant hand is palm up.
It should be noted that there are sometimes other considerations that can be added into signs. “Language Files” shows that these include things such as facial features and one-handedness versus two-handedness in signs. However, it is generally accepted that these function more a suprasegmentals, and that the four parameters listed above are the more crucial elements of various signs.
One fundamental difference between spoken and signed languages is that while in spoken languages’ phones occur separately; occurring one after the other, signed languages phones all occur at the same time. For example, if one makes a handshape, it will, by necessity, exist in a certain location, have a certain movement or lack thereof, and have a certain orientation. For this reason it must be understood that while the parameters of sign are listed separately below, they would always be found co-occurring with the other parameters to make up a single sign phone.
Handshapes
In the early 1900s, information was provided by the Bureau of American Ethnology that gave the alphabet of PISL. It should be noted that while there are more letters in the PISL alphabet, these letters are achieved by changing the orientation of the same handshape. Thus, there are less hand shapes than there are letters in the PISL alphabet. In PISL, the following handshapes may be found. The letters in parentheses are the corresponding alphabet letters. The following descriptions are adapted from the descriptions in the report from the Bureau of American Ethnology.- Fist, thumb in front of fingers (A or B)
- Fist, thumb at side of fingers (C)
- Fingers clenched, thumb touching middle of index finger (D)
- Fingers hooked, thumb touching back tip of index finger (E)
- Fingers hooked, thumb at side of fingers (F)
- Fingers hooked, thumb touching tips of fingers (G)
- Fingers slightly bent, thumb at side tip of index finger (H)
- Fist, except index finger forming hook with thumb holding tip of index finger (I)
- Fist, except index finger fully extended (J, K, or M)
- Fist, except index finger and thumb extended, thumb bends at last joint to form 90 degree angle with index finger (L)
- Fist except index and middle fingers fully extended (N)
- Thumb, index, and middle finger pointing upward and separated, ring finger and pinky curved horizontally (O)
- All fingers and thumb pointing upward and separated, palm cupped (P and Q)
- All fingers and thumb fully extended and separated (R)
- All fingers and thumb fully extended and held together (S and T)
- Fingers gathered to a point, palm cupped, with thumb in the middle (U)
- Fingers slightly bent, thumb at side of index finger (V)
- All fingers and thumb extended, relaxed (Y)
Location
PISL uses the following locations. The various neutral spaces are the most common places for signs to occur. These were found in “Indian Talk” by Iron Eyes Cody.- Left side of torso
- Right side of torso
- Neutral space (centered in front of torso)
- Upper neutral space
- Lower neutral space
- Left neutral space
- Right neutral space
- Mouth
- nose
- Chin front
- Below chin
- Cheek
- Eye
- Below nose (above mouth)
- Forehead
- Head top (attached to top of head)
- Head side (attached to head above ear)
- Head back (attached to back of head)
- Side of head right (space to the right side of head)
- Side of head left (space to the left side of head)
- Side of head front right (space in front of head on the right)
- Side of head front left (space in front of head on the left)
- Above head
- Ear (attached to head at ear)
- Beside ear (space beside ear)
- Wrist
- Palm front
- Palm back
- Left side of hand
- Right side of hand
- Below hand
- Above hand
- fingers
- Before face (space in front of face)
- Chest
- Chest right
- Chest left
- Elbow
- forearm
- shoulder
- feet
Orientation
Sharing much in common with many of the world’s signed languages, the following orientations are used in PISL. These are the directions towards which the palm would face. They have also been found in “Indian Talk” by Iron Eyes Cody. It should be noted that these are the basic orientations. The movement of a sign may carry it through other orientations, but these are a result of the movement, not a separate orientation.- Up
- Down
- Non-dominant side
- Dominant side
- Toward signer
- Away from signer
Movement
The movements listed below constitute those that may be found in PISL. These also have been gathered from “Indian Talk” by Iron Eyes Cody. Note that movements may be repeated in certain situations.- Stationary (no movement)
- Downward
- Upward
- Forward
- Backward
- Toward dominant side
- toward non-dominant side
- Upward arch
- Downward arch
- Backward arch
- Forward arch
- Toward dominant side arch
- Toward non-dominant side arch
- Diagonal up and right
- Diagonal up and left
- Diagonal down and right
- Diagonal down and left
- Rotating
- Vertical circle
- Horizontal circle
Further reading
- Newell, Leonard E. (1981). A stratificational description of Plains Indian Sign Language. Forum Linguisticum 5: 189-212.
- "Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes," First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-1880, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1881, pages 263-552
- Clark, William Philo. 1885. The Indian Sign Language