Mexican Sign Language, an endangered language? Bimodal contact and sociolinguistic documentation

Abstract

Mexican Sign Language (LSM) shares with the indigenous languages of Mexico a marginal status. Being a minority language, lsm is at a disadvantage in a cultural context where Spanish determines the social value of communication.
Unlike indigenous languages, LSM is not a verbal language. Its contact with Spanish cannot cause a displacement within the Mexican Deaf community. In contrast, the contact between verbal and sign language entails effects that affect the original structure of language. The rate at which these changes take place is considerable and is advancing with no opposition.
This paper is a first approach to the sociolinguistic conditions of the Deaf community in Culiacan, Sinaloa. I describe the differences between the two types of contact: unimodal – contact between two verbal or sign languages and – bimodal – between a sign and a verbal language. The results of the latter are linguistic variations that may be masked as the standard language. The real threat is the lack of information about what is and is not LSM.