With over 6,000 languages spoken worldwide and a history of colonialism and nationalism, people commonly have proficiency in the indigenous language of a region or of a non-localized minority group (ethnic, religious, Deaf, etc.), as well as in a national language. Monolingual or multilingual, dictionaries are products of their sociolinguistic environment. Though dictionaries may be treated by the public as a way to make the language into a static, bounded entity, lexicographers must contend with a lack of clear boundaries as to where their object languages end, given that their language communities include multilingual speakers. Despite this widespread bilingualism, language contact has not been thoroughly treated in English-language literature on lexicography. This chapter synthesizes the different ways that language contact manifests itself through dictionaries. It demonstrates that the asymmetry between the social standing of languages in contact manifests itself in the production and composition of dictionaries. It explores the difficulties that come with establishing the boundaries of the object language, with particular attention to Creoles and signed languages. The chapter details the problems that such difficulties pose to dictionaries of foreignisms. We conclude with an exploration of how language contact can and should inform the future of dictionary creation.

This chapter deals with the study of how deaf and hearing signers, and others, understand sign languages by themselves and in relationship to other languages and modalities. By doing linguistic ethnography, it is possible to investigate these language attitudes and ideologies as they unfold in everyday practice, towards ideas such as the status of sign languages and particular varieties; discourses surrounding linguistic authority, authenticity and ownership; and the emergence (or development) of new sign languages and new subject-specific vocabulary. The methods discussed in this chapter are ethnographic research methods and visual methods: participant observation, ethnographic filmmaking, and language portraits. The main points of the chapter are illustrated by means of three case studies: (1) participant observation in multilingual tourist spaces in Bali, in which Indonesian Sign Language, International Sign, and American Sign Language are used; (2) ethnographic filmmaking within an international multi-sited research project focusing on International Sign; and (3) the use of language portraits with new signers and heritage signers in Flanders, who mostly use Flemish Sign Language and Dutch.

This chapter explores the ways that Deaf epistemologies and ontologies revise our understanding of sound as both an acoustic and cultural phenomenon. While it is often assumed that deafness constitutes a total lack of sound, deaf people engage with sound both directly and indirectly in range of ways and through diverse modalities. There is also a historical link between the development of technologies of sound recording and deafness; more specifically, the desire to teach deaf people to speak. The connection between sound reproduction and the ideology of oralism functions as a vital reminder of the dangers of the conflation of verbal speech and agency in the English word ‘voice.’ After reviewing the physiological and historical ways sound has functioned in deaf lives, the chapter considers its cultural role through a reading of the work of contemporary Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim. Kim’s art explores the visual and tactile components of sound as well as its social dynamics, highlighting similarities between sound and signed languages as spatial systems of meaning that are also both ephemeral and highly inflected.