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Can you have an accent in sign language? Might someone from New York sign differently than someone from Los Angeles?

• Dracophoenix 4y ago
  If by accent, you mean an idiolect, perhaps, but such an "accent" is likely limited to families or in-jokes among friends. Geographic differences in sign languages are more comparable to differences in dialects. Thus, some sign languages are more mutually intelligible than others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_Sign_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_Sign_Langu...
• rectang 4y ago
  It seems inevitable that slight changes of gesture or angle or rhythm would emerge in isolated signing populations, analogous to the way accents develop in isolated speaking populations.
• smscott 4y ago
  Absolutely. There are accents, idioms, and even different signs for the same word that may vary between region, generation, and personal history with the language. e.g a southerner can likely guess someone is from the northeast with high confidence and vice versa. People raised Deaf can often tell if another person is hearing, or someone who was raised mainstream without access to sign language until later in life. There can also be family/hyperlocale idioms or even individual signs that won’t be readily understood outside the group; I think this is true for most languages as forms of inside jokes and the like. Two words in ASL that I’ve noted have a few distinct signs in different areas are strawberry and mean (“he is a mean person”).