A Sociolinguistic Study of the Use of Indian Sign Language

This paper discusses the “Language Use” pattern of ISL by the deaf community. This paper aims to understand the vitality of sign language within the community and to foresee whether ISL is likely to be maintained in coming future. As proposed by Boehm (1997:67), “The choices people make in regard to language use reflect trend towards either language maintenance and language shift. To some extent, this reveals the vitality of the language. Fase et al. (1992:6) says that, “It has been commonly found that when the mother tongue of the minority language remains dominant in communication within the ethnic group, it can be said that mother tongue has been maintained.” This survey also deals with the major issue faced by the deaf community in this speech dominant society, which is huge “communication gap” with the majority speaking people of our society.