‘Variation in Indonesian Sign Language’ – Nick Palfreyman’s book is published

We’re delighted to announce that our Reader Nick Palfreyman’s book on BISINDO (Indonesian Sign Language) is now available.

The book is based on research that Dr. Palfreyman conducted with members of the Indonesian sign community. His pioneering work uses a corpus of conversational data from signers in two cities, Solo and Makassar, and looks at how they express negatives and completives (indicating that something has ‘already’ happened).

Palfreyman (2019) is the first academic monograph about BISINDO.

As well as covering linguistic and sociolinguistic variation, the book includes a historical overview of the sign community, and seeks to place findings in the community context.

Nick said: “So many people have contributed to this book in very different ways – I’d like to thank each of them for their input. The book is dedicated to the Indonesian deaf community, and I would like to single out Muhammad Isnaini, Jayeng Pranoto and Oktaviany Wulansari for sharing their expertise with me.”

He continued: “The book is written in English, which is not accessible to members of the BISINDO community – so my next task is to interpret the findings into BISINDO. I plan to do this in April when I return from my next fieldtrip, so that my BISINDO is as fluent as possible.”

The book, Variation in Indonesian Sign Language: A Typological and Sociolinguistic Analysis, is eighth in the Sign Language Typology series, published by Ishara Press (Lancaster) and de Gruyter Mouton (Berlin), and is available here.