Welcome to www.plainssign.com
This website is about Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL or Plains Sign), a sign language used as a lingua franca by the Native Americans across the great plains and even beyond from time immemorial. Plains Sign was already established as a lingua franca by the time the first Euorpeans arrived in the area and wrote down what they saw 500 years ago (Davis 2010 page 18-19 referring to, among others, the 1542 writings of Cabeza de Vaca’s journey across the American south and west from 1527-1535). Plains Sign was also an important source of signs in the development of American Sign Language (ASL). There is upwards of 50% lexical similarity between the two sign languages (Davis 2010:127), which is far more than could ever happen by accident.
The aim of this site is to make Plains Sign and information related to it easily accessible.
Features I would like to add to this website:
- a Plains Sign dictionary
- there are several Plains Sign dictionaries that were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These were made at different times and with Plains Signing informants from different areas.
- these dictionaries contain a wealth of information, but as of yet, their data has never been combined in a single place.
- most of these resources do have decent scans available on the internet for free, but only one so far has a good digital text version.
- a list of resources. as of yet, there are no decent lists of resources for Plains Sign available on the internet. Here are a few quick lists:
- features coming soon will be:
- links to the resources
- lots more information about each resource, such as the number of signs in dictionaries and how many illustrations they have.
- Dictionaries:
- Mallory 1880
- Tomkins 1926
- Seton 1918
- Hadley 1887
- Clark 1885
- About Plains Sign:
- a map that shows where eaxtly and from which group each sign was collected, when data is available
- a way for users to upload their own signs
- a way for users to comment on the different signs