Gender variation in signs of sexual behaviour in Hong Kong Sign Language

What is it about?

This paper discusses possible gender variation in the signs of sexual behaviour in Hong Kong Sign Language. The data came from a research project that aims at documenting and analyzing sex-related signs in this sign language for the sake of producing materials for sex education and interpreter training programs. Since sex is a highly tabooed topic, euphemistic signs for the target concepts were also collected and analyzed. This paper presents evidence that linguistic variation of neutral and euphemistic expressions of sex-related concepts exists in HKSL, and that gender plays a role in the choice of some but not all variants and their euphemistic counterparts.

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Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This paper is one of the few studies that touch upon the sensitive semantic domain about sex with a documentation approach. Our findings provide preliminary insights on how sex-related taboos and euphemism are used in the Hong Kong Deaf community and the role of gender in the shaping of the linguistic variation, though study of a larger scale is still needed to reach a more firmed conclusion. Furthermore, this paper proposes criteria to deal with variant forms that are composed of more than two lexical signs or classifiers, which is a first attempt in the study of linguistic variation. The observations in this paper, though preliminary and limited, do offer new directions for possible future researches. At the same time, the variation documented and analyzed will be extremely useful in preparing sex-education materials for the Deaf community and sign language interpretation training programmes.

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