The Linguistics of Sign Languages (Not in series)

For years I’ve been interested in the linguistics of sign languages, but have had a hard time finding resources on the topic, particularly for languages other than ASL, or comparative linguistics between sign languages. I purchased this book for individual self-study, so I can’t speak to it for other purposes such as use as a classroom textbook. But for my goals it was perfect.In college I took two semesters of ASL and earned a minor in Linguistics, so I have a small amount of background on both sides of the topic, but I had so many unanswered questions about sign languages around the world. Do they all use handshape classifiers? Is the future always forward, and the past behind you? How different are the possible handshapes around the world? Are sign languages as different from each other as spoken languages are, or are they more uniform? And many more. After reading this book I don’t have answers to all my questions (some topics just haven’t been researched enough yet, since it’s a young field) but most were at least addressed in the book.A few topics that stood out to me as personal favorites were language acquisition, the phonetics of compound signs, and iconicity in sign lexicon. But really, I’d say there’s a not a boring section among them. I appreciate that Sign Language of the Netherlands is often used as a default example, which makes sense because the authors are all at universities in the Netherlands. I find it a refreshing change from the information I’ve read elsewhere about American Sign Language.One of my favorite aspects of the book is that each chapter has an extensive section on references and future reading, which is absolute gold for someone like me who isn’t sure where to look for information. The book also makes use of online supplements with video clip demonstrations of various signs and grammatical structures. Having a paper book linked to online resources is always risky, as I have noticed in the past with other texts that list online resources that went extinct several years ago. While reading I encountered a number of broken or mistaken links, and this is only a year after the book was initially published, but in spite of that it was very helpful.I was a little puzzled by the ordering of the chapters, particularly how it deals with discourse and syntax before getting into issues of phonetics, morphology, and lexicon. I was so tantalized by the references to future chapters that eventually I skipped forward and then went back for the syntax chapters at the end, which worked out fine but made me curious why that structure was chosen.As for the physical book, I purchased the paperback version and have been pleased with it. The paper is slick with good text contrast, and I was quite pleasantly surprised by the fact that it has full-color photographs as well as black-and-white images and diagrams. It’s conveniently sized to carry around and the pages lie flat well.This has been an unsolicited review, born purely from my enthusiasm for this book and its subject material. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.