Multimodal Languaging in a Signing Community in the Bay Islands of Honduras

Abstract: Deaf-sighted, deaf-blind, and hearing-sighted people have been interacting within a small community in the Bay Islands of Honduras for over a century (Ali 2023; Ali and Braithwaite 2020). In this article, we sketch the history of the community and the ways in which signers make use of their own and their interlocutor's bodies to co-construct meaning. Based on a short conversation between two deaf-blind signers, we identify mechanisms used to regulate turn-taking, including some which are familiar from other visual and tactile sign languages, and some which are rather novel in the literature. We show that signers make use of visual and tactile-proprioceptive channels, bearing in mind, but not entirely determined by, the sensorial orientations of their interlocutors. We conclude that this way of languaging is not a visual sign language and not yet fully adapted to the tactile modality, nor is it undeveloped or disordered in any other sense. Rather, we believe that this case demonstrates the ways in which human languaging makes use of multiple modalities and adapts to the needs of each interactional context. While linguists have sometimes been inclined to classify languages into neat modality boxes (auditory-vocal, visual-gestural, tactile-gestural), this analysis supports Henner and Robinson's (2023) calls for what they term a crip linguistics , which embraces disabled ways of languaging, rejects ideas of disordered language, and recognizes languaging as multimodal.