Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this research is to identify current situation of Sign Language Issues in Kyrgyzstan. The Russian Sign Language is used as a SL for all Deaf people in Kyrgyzstan as in the other parts of post-soviet landscape.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of this research is to identify current situation of Sign Language Issues in Kyrgyzstan. The Russian Sign Language is used as a SL for all Deaf people in Kyrgyzstan as in the other parts of post-soviet landscape.

The paper analyzes the challenges that deaf community and schools face. Society of Deaf and Blind in Kyrgyz Republic estimates 9507 disabled people in the country by January 2017.

The data collected at the National Deaf school will be the main core of the analysis. Since Kyrgyz language acquired official status in 1989, the classes of the Kyrgyz language are conducted via bilingual method while translating gestures from Russian into Kyrgyz at the National Deaf school.

However according to the official information of the Ministry of Education and Science, there is no officially accredited and codified Kyrgyz Sign language across the country despite there are some attempts to create it.

Department of Special Education and Psychological Correction at the Ishenaly Arabaev State University trains teachers in Surdopedagogy and Oligophrenic pedagogy; their curriculum contains only some courses of gesture communication and Sign Language teachers have to develop their competency in gestures and signs by themselves.

Recently some projects of non-governmental agencies started short-term courses of training the Sign Language Interpreters from the spoken Kyrgyz language into the Russian Sign Language.

I argue that Sign Language Issues are not studied as a separate topic of research in the country. The lack of the research background makes the study extremely significant in the context of modern Post-soviet Linguistics. The research will concern the 'information conveyed by manual signs, the synchronicity between two hands'. The study also specifies if the Sign Language in Kyrgyzstan shares any significant similarities with their respective the spoken languages and culture.

Paper long abstract:

Mealtime narratives provide insight into the social world of a community as demonstrated, for example, by Ochs and Taylor's (1995) work on gender dynamics in middle-class American families. There is a little of such research in post-Soviet Kazakhstan that is experiencing tremendous sociocultural changes (e.g., Kesici 2011). Applying the idea of three levels of positioning in narrative (e.g., Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008), I examine how two Kazakh-speaking participants discursively construct their identity as Kazakhs and village members through alignment and disalignment with other village members in the context of two mealtime narratives. Two narratives were taken from a mealtime conversation between a female and male participants who are neighbors residing in the village in the north of Kazakhstan. Both narrative focus on the topic of thefts. First, I analyze the characters' attributes and actions in the narratives' story worlds (level one), then highlight purposes that story worlds serve their tellers in the storytelling worlds (level two), and then relate the results to the master narratives of nation-building in Kazakhstan (level three). Analyses reveal that at the first level, in the story worlds, the narrators disalign with neighbors who steal personal items. Specifically, they assign negative actions (e.g., 'sweep everything') and negative attributes (e.g., 'behind my back') to the ones who stole their personal belongings such as a knife and four kilograms of meat. The teller portrait themselves as a victim through describing their emotional state (e.g., 'walked in sadness') and inability to act (e.g., 'did not confront'). This disalignment is also demonstrated through pronoun choices (I/we vs. they) and evaluative devices (Labov 1972) like adjectives (e.g., 'shrewd') and rhetorical questions (e.g., "What should I have done?"). At the second level, or the storytelling world, the tellers effectively employ the narratives to further construct their individual identities as 'authentic' Kazakhs and neighbors by aligning with each other. They feed off each other's narratives in story rounds (Tannen 2005) and explicitly evaluate the stories as an inevitable part of the village lifestyle. Connecting to the third level, disalignment with dishonest neighbors in the story-world and alignment between the story-tellers in the storytelling world highlight resentment of the Soviet generation towards Soviet communistic regime, in which the lines between private and collective properties were blurred. In conclusion, this research reveals the fruitfulness of personal narratives in understanding connections among language, community, and identity.

Paper long abstract:

Linguists who specialize in the Altaic linguistic area and/or the Uralic languages readily recognize that both vowel harmony and disharmony are ubiquitous among these language groups (Hahn 1991). Generative phonologists, in their endeavors to explain disharmony, took a largely synchronic approach to analysis, producing long-winded disputes and solutions that solve their own equations yet propose improbable psycholinguistic processes for language acquisition. Meanwhile, generativists' contemporaries in Korean studies such as Wanjin Kim (1978), Chin W. Kim (1978), Namgui Chang (1982) and Shirô Hattori (1982) utilized a diachronic approach that yielded a more watertight analysis of disharmony and other harmonic changes from Middle Korean (15th c.) onward. Young-Key Kim-Renaud (2008), Sang-Oak Lee (2003), and Ho-Min Sohn (2001) have produced better results still, again using diachronic methods and with little or no recourse to generative devices such as abstract underlying forms and optimality theory, and at least some Western linguists (Binnich 1991, Hahn 1991) have seen similar results through diachronic analysis. What is found wanting even in this diachronic literature, however, is a psycholinguistically-based, causal explanation for the emergence of disharmonic forms. Where generative phonologists' attempts at such have not proven productive, a perspective grounded in usage-based linguistics can provide an explanation that neglects neither speakers' cognition nor the histories of their languages. Based on my prior work—a critical review of the history of harmonic rule-changes in Korean, and an original pilot study of vowel formants from publicly available records of speakers' conversations—I present a diachronic, usage-based model to explain not only the emergence of disharmonic forms but also harmonic rule-loss over time. I then apply the same model to an analysis of vowel harmony in modern Uyghur, which lends itself to this line of analysis despite its genetic and areal distance from Standard Korean. I then claim, in response to Robert Binnich's (1991) assertion that cross-linguistic influence is not a necessary explanation for harmonic loss, that his assertion is accurate in a strict sense, but also that substantial cross-linguistic influence can act as a potent catalyst for disharmony and rule-loss.