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Demographic and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Persons with Language–Use Limitations, and Special Languages

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Demographic and Socioeconomic Basis of Ethnolinguistics

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Abstract

Some groups in the population have special problems in coding and decoding written and spoken languages and they have had to adopt alternative methods of communication or use irregular speech patterns. Such groups include sensory-impaired persons (i.e., hearing-impaired persons and visually impaired persons), persons having learning disabilities or other speech impediments, such as occur with brain injuries, and persons with neuropsychiatric conditions such as cognitive impairment or schizophrenia. Some groups use special languages for religious ceremonies and rituals that are different from their ordinary speech. Some engage in use of secret languages to conceal their conversation from others, such as the play speech of some children. Many adults address very young children who may be just learning to speak or their pets by a special variation of their ordinary speech. These secret and play languages are here collectively grouped under the heading of “ludlings.” In social networking by computer and related devices young people use a special language for their communication with one another. Finally, artificial languages have been constructed for a variety of reasons. They may have been devised to facilitate international communication between persons who normally speak different languages. Occasionally artificial languages have been created for literary or dramatic purposes, as in science fiction, to represent the speech of beings in outer space. Artificial languages have also been devised to make possible communication between people and machines, and between machines and other machines. Such languages are denoted machine languages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A written version of a sign language must represent the configurations and movements of the hands, head, and body in some complex version of ordinary writing. There is an analogy in the notation for dance, which is also three dimensional. Several notation systems for writing sign language have been proposed, but most of them were simple imitations of the writing practices of spoken language. The system called Sign Writing developed by Valerie Sutton uses the spatial relationships of symbols in a two-dimensional “sign box” in order to represent a sign (Thiessen 2011). Sign Writing has a grammar, that is, rules that determine how symbols function and how they combine to form the written signs. According to Thiessen, there are seven major categories of symbols: Hand symbols, movement symbols, a head circle with a set of modifiers, torso and limb symbols, dynamic symbols, punctuation , and sign-spelling notation. The movement symbols describe how the symbols for body parts move and interact with other body parts, and the dynamic symbols provide additional information on the nature of the movement. There are approximately 35,000 symbols, which are variations of 639 base symbols.

  2. 2.

    One hypothesis regarding the progression of language skills in Alzheimer’s Disease is offered by social workers attending patients afflicted with AD. It is that, just as the Activities of Daily Living (ADL—eating, bathing, toileting, transferring, and grooming.) are learned by children in a particular order in early childhood and just as AD patients lose these abilities in reverse order, so language skills were learned in a particular order and, with the progression of AD , language skills are lost in the reverse order in which they were learned.

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  1. North Bethesda, MD, USA

    Jacob S. Siegel

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Siegel, J.S. (2018). Demographic and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Persons with Language–Use Limitations, and Special Languages. In: Demographic and Socioeconomic Basis of Ethnolinguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61778-7_14

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