Last night I was talking to a stranger about sign language, because of the story above, and discovered that he was under the false impression that there’s only one sign language. He was pretty surprised to find out that there are many, that American Sign Language “speakers” can’t even understand British Sign Language “speakers” because they’re literally completely unrelated languages.

This all goes to highlight the problems inherent in little known languages. For instance, if the imposter in the story was an Afrikaans interpreter, it’s unlikely he would’ve made it on stage because there would have presumably been many instances along the way when he could have been caught. For sign language, probably not so many.

This is a problem not just for catching imposters, but even for actual speakers of languages that don’t get used often. For instance, this stranger I met was from New Zealand where some people are trying to revive the Māori language. Problems arise because there’s no reinforcement of language norms there. Teachers are often not native speakers and make lots of mistakes, sometimes large mistakes, but students simply assume that the teachers are correct. Later, when these students attempt to talk to grandparents that are native speakers, they have no ability to communicate whatsoever.

Languages are not tangible things, they’re abstract entities that are socially constructed. Without regularly sharing and reinforcing norms with other speakers, it’s impossible to know if you’re using the language or simply saying gibberish, as the imposter signer was.