Zinacantec Family Homesign (ZFHS) is a new sign language which has emerged spontaneously over the past three decades in a single family in a remote Mayan Indian village in Chiapas, Mexico. It provides a unique opportunity to explore fundamental questions about the nature, origins, and evolution of human language. Three profoundly deaf siblings, their hearing age-mates, and now their infant children, have had contact with no other deaf people nor with any pre-existing sign language. Through periodic video recording of ZFHS signers the project will study (1) formational principles in the emerging structure of the sign language, especially the "portability" of signs; (2) evidence of morphological structure, the emergence of grammatical categories and syntax; (3) potential typological and structural relations between ZFHS and spoken Tzotzil; (4) possible sources for ZFHS sign in Tzotzil co-speech gesture; and (5) the sociolinguistics of the ZFHS speech community, including variation in the first generation and emerging linguistic properties in the second. By combining a detailed linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of ZFHS as evidenced by adult usage with systematic longitudinal study of the infants' bilingual socialization into language, the project will contribute in a unique way to scientific understanding of how human communicative needs recruit, transform, and structure complementary modalities, both visible and audible, to fashion language itself.
Research on the languages of the deaf, especially as they evolve in "natural" conditions, has an ameliorative contribution to make both to linguistics as a discipline and to the deaf speakers of such languages. More broadly, this research will make a direct contribution to an old question with resurgent interest: how is human language created, and how does it evolve and structure itself, in different sorts of "speech communities" (even, as in this case, minimal ones) over the time course of successive human generations.
