Sign Language Accents

I realised I’d been thinking about accents entirely in terms of sound.

If somebody from Yorkshire and somebody from London can pronounce the same English word differently, what happens when the language isn’t spoken at all?

Turns out I’d been asking the wrong question.

Sign languages have regional variation too. The same concept can be signed differently depending on where someone learned to sign, their age, their community and other influences — much like spoken languages develop dialects and accents.

Which immediately gave me a much more interesting question:

Could a sign language have its equivalent of something like the Great Vowel Shift?

Not literally vowels suddenly moving around, obviously. But a large, systematic change in how parts of a language are produced, spreading through generations of users until the language looks noticeably different from what came before.

This is how I end up learning things.

One perfectly reasonable question lasts approximately thirty seconds before it breeds.