Lexical Anxieties in Jordanian Sign Language (LIU)

This paper focuses on a project at a government advocacy body for disabled Jordanians I was involved in as a participant-observer to assess the current state of sign language and deaf education in Jordan, as part of a larger project examining deaf Jordanians' engagements with new assistive technologies that have emerged there in the last two decades. At this government entity, even as they insisted that Jordanian Sign Language (LIU, from the Arabic lughat al-’ishara al-’urduniyyah) was the “mother tongue” of deaf Jordanians and that they should have access to it, one of the concerns foregrounded in the project was that LIU did not contain sufficient technical and scientific vocabulary to be the language of instruction in Jordanian deaf schools. Some staff even expressed doubts about the language’s grammaticality, despite research that has demonstrated to the contrary (Hendriks 2008; Al-Fityani and Padden 2008; Al-Fityani 2010). Such anxieties over the state of LIU—whether, as my interlocutors expressed, it had sufficient capacity to “meet the needs” of the Jordanian deaf community today—cannot be understood outside of the multilingual context of Jordan and the Middle East, where parallel debates take place about the role of Arabic in society, and reflect a denotational bias: that if there is not a word for a particular concept, it cannot be expressed. Rather, I demonstrate through ethnographic observations in deaf Jordanian classrooms that teachers proficient in LIU in fact draw upon a range of semiotic resources to teach, such as drawing on the board, pointing, and gesturing, to discuss even technical subjects like physics and biology. I draw on this case, building on recent research on signed language ideologies (Kusters et al. 2020), to demonstrate the importance of ethnography for pushing back against misunderstandings about what sign language is and how it is used.