Variation and social meaning in BISINDO (Indonesian Sign Language): An investigation at the micro-level

A burgeoning body of work in sign language sociolinguistics can be described as ‘macro-social’, exploring sign language variation in terms of groupings such as region, age, gender and register.

Recently, a series of ‘micro-social’ studies have appeared, pitched at the level of discourse (Palfreyman 2016, 2018, Blau 2017, Jaeger 2019, McKee 2019). This research joins those studies and builds on Eckert’s ‘waves’ of analytic practice in socio-linguistics (Eckert 2012). As with studies of spoken language users, I focus on macro- and micro-level contexts (Sharma 2011, 2017), regarding sign language variation as a way to create meaning and index identities.