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Introduction
Joseph Hill is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Sign Language and Interpreting Education in the National Technical Institutes for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. His research interests include socio-historical and -linguistic aspects of African-American variety of American Sign Language and attitudes and ideologies about signing varieties in the American Deaf community. His contributions include The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure (2011) which he co-authored with Carolyn McCaskill, Ceil Lucas, and Robert Bayley and Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community (2012).
Publications
Publications (10)
This paper explores how language attitudes and ideologies impact perceptions of language varieties in the American Deaf community, with a particular focus on Black ASL, the variety of ASL developed by African Americans in the South during the era of segregation. Results of multivariate analysis show that on a number of dimensions, Black ASL, partic...
The article discusses the importance of sociohistorical context which is the foundation of variation studies in sociolinguistics. The studies on variation in spoken and signed languages are reviewed with the discussion of geographical and social aspects which are treated as external factors in the formation and maintenance of dialects and those fac...
As the black and deaf coauthors of The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure, Joseph Hill and Carolyn McCaskill reflect on their journey from the origin of the Black ASL project to the publication of The Hidden Treasure and beyond. Their reflections offer intimate details about and insights into the importance of the Black ASL pro...
With the Deaf communities, sociolinguistic researchers face special challenges through the different phases of the sociolinguistic projects: recruitment, data collection, and data presentation. This chapter discusses only recruitment and data collection. It addresses the special challenges, and provides a description of data collection methods that...
In May 2011, a major controversy erupted in Italy regarding the official recognition of the sign language used by Italian Deaf people (see Nassisi 2010; La protesta 2011; LIS Subito! n.d.; Searls 2011). Since the 1980s, this sign language has been recognized in the Italian Deaf community as Lingua dei Segni Italiana (conventionally abbreviated as L...
This article reports on the intersection of African American English (AAE) and a variety of American Sign Language (ASL) used by Black signers and known as Black ASL. Based on an extensive videotaped corpus collected from 96 African American signers in the southern United States, we explore the conditions that led to the development of a separate A...
In a diverse signing community, it is not unusual to encounter a wide variety of expression in the types of signs used by different people. Perceptions of signing proficiency often vary within the community, however. Conventional wisdom intimates that those who learned at an early age at home or in school know true basic or standard American Sign L...
The experiences of teaching a CS1 course that included a deaf student are presented. The intention of this presentation is to provide guidelines for improving the learning environment for future classes of similar student composition.
