Estimating size, scope, and membership of the speech/sign communities of undocumented indigenous/village sign languages: The Ban Khor case study

Indigenous or village sign languages arise suddenly, spread rapidly, and disappear quickly. Their compressed life cycles lend urgency to and pose challenges for language documentation, description, preservation, and revitalization. This case study analysis of a Thai village sign language demonstrates how the traditional anthropological methods of mapping, surname analysis, kinship diagramming, medical genetic pedigrees, and social network analysis were effectively combined to develop a foundational description of the size, scope, and membership of Ban Khor Sign Language's speech/sign community. This replicable metric can aid other fieldworkers in producing baseline accounts of the speech/sign communities of other un(der)documented indigenous sign languages.