Linguists Document Philadelphia ‘Accent’ of American Sign Language

Meredith Tamminga, an assistant professor in linguistics and director of the University’s Language Variation and Cognition Lab, and Jami Fisher, a linguistics lecturer and Penn’s ASL Program coordinator, are working to document what they’re calling the Philadelphia "accent" of American Sign Language (ASL).

“Philadelphia ASL historically, and I think anecdotally, has always been seen as a little different,” Fisher says. “We’re not really sure why.”

That basic idea planted the seed for asking bigger questions. What differentiates Philly ASL from other such dialects? Why do those in the deaf community have an intuition that it’s different? And how could scientists better understand the regional variation?

“We don’t know much about it beyond the lexical level, which is the equivalent of who says ‘pop’ and who says ‘soda,’” Tamminga said. “People get really excited about it but from a linguistic point of view, it’s fairly superficial. People can learn new words and the words spread.”

Rather, Fisher and Tamminga wanted to dig deeper, basing their research on the way Bill Labov, the former John H. and Margaret B. Fassitt Professor of Linguistics at Penn, studied the area’s spoken language for more than five decades, focusing on subtle and granular changes like how a vowel’s use morphs over time.

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