LANGUAGE DESCRIPTION
Academic study of TTSL is still in its infancy. For most of its history, academics remained oblivious to its existence, and surveys of the languages of Trinidad and Tobago have only recently begun mentioning it. Research has been led by deaf people themselves, keen to document their language and to teach it to hearing people. Recent work includes a Government-funded project to produce a dictionary of TTSL, and this research project based in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at UWI, staffed by a team of deaf and hearing researchers who have made recordings of signers around the country, in order to understand the language situation better.
Like most languages around the world, TTSL does not exist in isolation: it has been in contact with other languages, both signed and spoken, throughout its short history. In the very early years of deaf education, there was clearly some influence from British Sign Language (BSL), presumably through the Reverend Frederick Gilby, an Anglican priest from England, who grew up learning BSL as a native language from his deaf parents, and who played an important role in the foundation of Cascade School for the Deaf. The TTSL signs MOTHER, FATHER and NAME are among several which can be traced back to BSL (Fig. 1).
American Sign Language (ASL) was first widely used in T&T in the 1970s, and has had a growing influence through missionaries and educators from the US. Many Deaf Trinbagonians know both TTSL and ASL, and are able to switch between them effortlessly. ASL also has a system for representing letters of the Roman alphabet manually, which has been taught to deaf children since before full ASL was introduced. Many TTSL signs make use of this manual alphabet, such as the sign for ‘Trinidad’ which is based on a sign meaning ‘steelpan’ (resembling the action of playing a pan) combined with the ‘T’ handshape on each hand (Fig. 2).
Spoken languages have also had a significant effect on the development of TTSL. There are many TTSL signs which correspond to distinctively Trinbagonian words including DOUBLES (Fig. 3). One TTSL sign for Port of Spain is clearly derived from the near homophony between typical Trinbagonian pronunciations of ‘tongue’ and ‘town’ (Fig. 4).
TTSL not only has its own vocabulary; it also has it’s own grammar, distinct not just from spoken languages like Trinidadian English Creole and English, but also from other sign languages, such as ASL. For example, compare the three ways of asking the same question below (words in capital letters represent signs):
(1) What is your name? (English)
(2) YOUR NAME WHAT? (ASL)
(3) NAME YOU WHAT? (TTSL)
Like other languages, TTSL has different accents. For example, the sign ARIMA tends to be articulated differently by signers over 50 and those under 50: compare the slightly different hand configurations in Fig. 5. for the sign ARIMA. There are also regional variations, especially between signers in the North and South of Trinidad. For example, there is an alternative sign for ‘doubles’, shown in Fig. 6.
Traditionally, TTSL has been used primarily in interactions between deaf Trinbagonians. When signing with hearing people, deaf people often switch to a more ASL- or English- influenced way of signing. This has meant that there is a great shortage of sign language interpreters skilled in TTSL. Such interpreters are crucial to ensuring that deaf Trinbagonians receive fair access to education, health care, justice and freedom of expression. In order to develop more teaching materials and better training for interpreters, there is much more work to be done in documenting and describing the structure and usage of TTSL.
