The Relationship Between Community Size and Iconicity in Sign Languages

Communication is harder in larger communities. Past research shows that this leads larger communities to create languages that are easier to learn and use. In particular, previous research suggests that spoken languages that are used by larger communities are more sound symbolic than spoken languages used by smaller communities, presumably, because sound symbolism facilitates language acquisition and use. This study tests whether the same principle extends to sign languages as the role of iconicity in the acquisition and use of sign languages is debated. Furthermore, sign languages are more iconic than spoken languages and are argued to lose their iconicity over time. Therefore, they might not show the same pattern. The paper also tests whether iconicity depends on semantic domain. Participants from five different countries guessed the meaning and rated the iconicity of signs from 11 different sign languages: five languages with >500,000 signers and six languages with <3000 signers. Half of the signs referred to social concepts (e.g., friend, shame) and half referred to nonsocial concepts (e.g., garlic, morning). Nonsocial signs from large sign languages were rated as more iconic than nonsocial signs from small sign languages with no difference between the languages for social signs. Results also suggest that rated iconicity and guessing accuracy are more aligned in signs from large sign languages, potentially because smaller sign languages are more likely to rely on culture-specific iconicity that is not as easily guessed outside of context. Together, this study shows how community size can influence lexical form and how the effect of such social pressures might depend on semantic domain.