Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), also known as Hand Talk, Plains Sign Talk, and First Nation Sign Language, is a trade language, formerly trade pidgin, that was once the lingua franca across what is now central Canada, the central and western United States and northern Mexico, used among the various Plains Nations. It was also used for story-telling, oratory, various ceremonies, and by deaf people for ordinary daily use. It is thought by some to be a manually coded language or languages; however, there is not substantive evidence establishing a connection between any spoken language and Plains Sign Talk. The name 'Plains Sign Talk' is preferred in Canada, with 'Indian' being considered pejorative by many who are Indigenous. Hence, publications and reports on the language vary in naming conventions according to origin. As a result of several factors, including the massive depopulation and the

Americanization Americanization or Americanisation (see spelling differences) is the influence of American culture and business on other countries outside the United States of America, including their media, cuisine, business practices, popular culture, te ...

of Indigenous North Americans, the number of Plains Sign Talk speakers declined from European arrival onward. In 1885, it was estimated that there were over 110,000 "sign-talking Indians", including Blackfoot,

Cheyenne The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enr ...

, Sioux,

Kiowa Kiowa () people are a Native American tribe and an indigenous people of the Great Plains of the United States. They migrated southward from western Montana into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the 17th and 18th centuries,Pritzker 326 and e ...

and

Arapaho The Arapaho (; french: Arapahos, ) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota. By the 1850s, Arapaho ba ...

.Tomkins, William. ''Indian sign language.'' epublication of "Universal Indian Sign Language of the Plains Indians of North America" 5th ed. 1931 New York : Dover Publications 1969. (p. 7) By the 1960s, there remained a "very small percentage of this number". There are few Plains Sign Talk speakers in the 21st century.

Geography

Sign language use has been documented across speakers of at least 37 spoken languages in twelve families,Davis, Jeffrey. 2006. "A historical linguistic account of sign language among North American Indian groups." In Multilingualism and Sign Languages: From the Great Plains to Australia; Sociolinguistics of the Deaf community, C. Lucas (ed.), Vol. 12, pp. 3–35. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press spread across an area of over 2.6 million square kilometres (1 million square miles). In recent history, it was highly developed among the

Crow A crow is a bird of the genus '' Corvus'', or more broadly a synonym for all of ''Corvus''. Crows are generally black in colour. The word "crow" is used as part of the common name of many species. The related term "raven" is not pinned scientifica ...

and

, among others, and remains strong among the Crow, Cheyenne and Arapaho. 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. Plains Sign Talk 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, or Old Plateau Sign Language, is a poorly attested, extinct sign language historically used across the Columbian Plateau. The Crow Nation The Crow, whose autonym is Apsáalooke (), also spelled Absaroka, are Native ...

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: *

Piman Piman (or Tepiman) refers to a group of languages within the Uto-Aztecan family that are spoken by ethnic groups (including the Pima) spanning from Arizona in the north to Durango, Mexico in the south. The Piman languages are as follows (Campb ...

: Pima, Papago, and continuing into northern Mexico * isolates of the Texas coast:

Coahuilteco Coahuilteco was one of the Pakawan languages that was spoken in southern Texas (United States) and northeastern Coahuila (Mexico). It is now extinct. Classification Coahuilteco was grouped in an eponymous Coahuiltecan family by John Wesley Po ...

Tonkawa The Tonkawa are a Native American tribe indigenous to present-day Oklahoma. Their Tonkawa language, now extinct, is a linguistic isolate. Today, Tonkawa people are enrolled in the federally recognized Tonkawa Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. ...

Karankawa The Karankawa were an Indigenous people concentrated in southern Texas along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, largely in the lower Colorado River and Brazos River valleys."Karankawa." In ''Cassell's Peoples, Nations and Cultures,'' edited by John ...

, Atakapa *

Yuman The Quechan (or Yuma) (Quechan: ''Kwatsáan'' 'those who descended') are a Native American tribe who live on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation on the lower Colorado River in Arizona and California just north of the Mexican border. Despite th ...

: Maricopa *

Numic Numic 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, Snake River basin, and southern Great Plains. The word Numic com ...

: Paiute, Ute, Comanche, Shoshone *

Tanoan Tanoan , also Kiowa–Tanoan or Tanoan–Kiowa, is a family of languages spoken by indigenous peoples in present-day New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Most of the languages – Tiwa (Taos, Picuris, Southern Tiwa), Tewa, and Towa – ...

Taos Taos or TAOS may refer to: Places * Taos, Missouri, a city in Cole County, Missouri, United States * Taos County, New Mexico, United States ** Taos, New Mexico, a city, the county seat of Taos County, New Mexico *** Taos art colony, an art colo ...

Zuni Pueblo Zuni Pueblo (also Zuñi Pueblo, Zuni: ''Halona Idiwan’a'' meaning ‘Middle Place’) is a census-designated place (CDP) in McKinley County, New Mexico, United States. The population was 6,302 as of the 2010 Census. It is inhabited largely b ...

Caddoan The Caddoan languages are a family of languages native to the Great Plains spoken by tribal groups of the central United States, from present-day North Dakota south to Oklahoma. All Caddoan languages are critically endangered, as the number of ...

: Wichita, Pawnee, Arikara * Athabaskan: Apache (Mescalero, Lipan, Jicarilla, and Kiowa Apache), Navajo, Sarcee, Beaver * Algonquian: Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Cree, Ojibwa *

Kutenai The Kutenai ( ), also known as the Ktunaxa ( ; ), Ksanka ( ), Kootenay (in Canada) and Kootenai (in the United States), are an indigenous people of Canada and the United States. Kutenai bands live in southeastern British Columbia, northern ...

Siouan Siouan or Siouan–Catawban is a language family of North America that is located primarily in the Great Plains, Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southeastern North America with a few other languages in the east. Name Authors who call the enti ...

: Mandan, Crow, Hidatsa, Omaha, Osage, Assinibion, Ponca, Oto, Sioux (Teton, Yankton, Yanktonai, Santee) * Sahaptian: Nez Perce, Sahaptin, Umatilla, Palus * Cayuse * Salish: Kalispel, Coeur d'Alene, Flathead, Spokane, Sanpoil (shifted from the distinct

) A distinct form is also reported from the

Wyandot Wyandot may refer to: Native American ethnography * Wyandot people, also known as the Huron * Wyandot language Wyandot (sometimes spelled Wandat) is the Iroquoian language traditionally spoken by the people known variously as Wyandot or Wya ...

of Ohio. It is known that Navajo has a comparably sizeable population of individuals who can speak the Navajo dialect of Plains Sign Talk. There is also an unrelated sign language, Navajo Family Sign, in a clan of

Navajos The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States. With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United ...

that has several deaf members. There exists a variety of Plains Sign Talk within the

Blackfoot Confederacy The Blackfoot Confederacy, ''Niitsitapi'' or ''Siksikaitsitapi'' (ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ, meaning "the people" or " Blackfoot-speaking real people"), is a historic collective name for linguistically related groups that make up the Blackfoot or Bla ...

. Little is known about the language beyond that it is used by Deaf community members, as well as by the community at large, to pass on "oral" traditions and stories.

Phonology

There are four basic parameters of Plains Sign Talk: the location of the hand, its movement, shape, and orientation:Bergmann et al,2007, pp. 79-86 *

Location In geography, location or place are used to denote a region (point, line, or area) on Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term ''location'' generally implies a higher degree of certainty than ''place'', the latter often indicating an entity with an ...

—this involves the spatial placement of a sign.Bergmann et al,2007 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.Cody, 1970 * Movement—this involves, as implied, the way the hands move when forming the sign. For example, in Plains Sign Talk, 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.Tomkins,1969 *

Handshape In sign languages, handshape, or dez, refers to the distinctive configurations that the hands take as they are used to form words. In Stokoe terminology it is known as the , an abbreviation of ''designator''. Handshape is one of five components ...

—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 Plains Sign Talk J shape, and in I-KNOW the hand takes the L shape. *

Orientation Orientation may refer to: Positioning in physical space * Map orientation, the relationship between directions on a map and compass directions * Orientation (housing), the position of a building with respect to the sun, a concept in building de ...

—this refers to the orientation of the palm. This is clearly seen in the Plains Sign Talk words 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. There may be other parameters, such as facial features. However, these function like

suprasegmental In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, str ...

s, and the four parameters listed above are the crucial ones. Although the parameters of sign are listed separately below, in actuality they co-occur with the other parameters to make a single sign. It is not clear how many of the differences were distinctive (

phonemic In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...

Handshape

In 1880, Colonel Garrick Mallery published a glossary that illustrates the handshapes involved in the first Annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology. He assigned alphabetic letters to the handshapes, "for reference ..to avoid tedious description, should any of them exactly correspond," as part of a suggested system of describing and cataloguing signs. *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

Plains Sign Talk uses the following locations. The various neutral spaces are the most common places for signs to occur. *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

These are the directions towards which the palm can face. *Up *Down *Non-dominant side *Dominant side *Toward signer *Away from signer

Movement

The movements below are found in Plains Sign Talk. They may be repeated in certain situations.

History

Plains Sign Talk's antecedents, if any, are unknown, due to lack of written records. But, the earliest records of contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the time of the Europeans' arrival there.Wurtzburg, Susan, and Campbell, Lyle. "North American Indian Sign Language: Evidence for its Existence before European Contact," ''International Journal of American Linguistics,'' Vol. 61, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 153-167. These records include the accounts of

Cabeza de Vaca In Mexican cuisine, ''cabeza'' (''lit.'' 'head') is the meat from a roasted head of an animal, served as taco A taco (, , ) is a traditional Mexican food consisting of a small hand-sized corn- or wheat-based tortilla topped with a filling ...

in 1527 and Coronado in 1541.

William Philo Clark William Philo Clark (July 27, 1845 – September 22, 1884) was a United States Army officer during the American Indian Wars#Great Plains, Plains Indian Wars. Clark was appointed to the US Military Academy at West Point and graduated in 1868. He ...

, who served in the

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...

on the northern plains during the

Indian Wars The American Indian Wars, also known as the American Frontier Wars, and the Indian Wars, were fought by European governments and colonists in North America, and later by the United States and Canadian governments and American and Canadian settle ...

, 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'' is a comprehensive lexicon of signs, with accompanying insights into indigenous cultures and histories. It remains in print.

Writing

As Plains Indian Sign Language was widely understood among different tribes, a

written Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Writing systems do not themselves constitute h ...

, graphic transcription of these signs is known to have functioned as a medium of communication between Native Americans on and off reservations during the period of American colonization, removal, and forced schooling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The letter of a Kiowa student, Belo Cozad, in 1890 sent to

Carlisle Indian School The United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, generally known as Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918. It took over the historic Carlisle B ...

in Pennsylvania from his parents on a reservation in Oklahoma made use of such signs and becomes one of the few known indigenous written transcriptions of the

Kiowa language Kiowa or Cáuijògà/Cáuijò:gyà ("language of the Cáuigù (Kiowa)") is a Tanoan language spoken by the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma in primarily Caddo, Kiowa, and Comanche counties. The Kiowa tribal center is located in Carnegie. Like most Nor ...

References

* Bergmann, Anouschka; Kathleen Currie Hall; Sharon Miriam Ross. "Language Files". USA. Ohio State University, 2007. * Bureau of American ethnology. "Annual report of the Bureau of American ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian institution". Washington, DC. Government printing office, 1881. * Cody, Iron Eyes. "Indian Talk". CA. Naturegraph Publishers, Inc, 1970. * Davis, Jeffrey E. "Hand Talk". USA. Cambridge University Press, 2010. * Tomkins, William. "Indian Sign Language". Toronto, Ontario. Dover Publications, Inc, 1969