The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology DEAF LANGUAGE Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway Oberlin College erhoffma@oberlin.edu Word Count 1,960 words Abstract Scholarly and popular perspectives concerning both the nature of deafness and of language vary across social and cultural contexts. The situated, contingent, and mutually constitutive nature of such concepts are consequential for the lived experience of deaf persons and for theories of language broadly. Linguistic anthropologists have focused on ethnographically detailing how deaf people navigate and generate such language ideologies. Keywords Deafness, signed languages, language ideologies Main Text While an entry focusing on “deaf language” might seem to have a straightforward purview (i.e., language used by those who are deaf), academic and popular perspectives concerning both what persons and what sets of communicative practices fit into either of these categories vary. This review thus highlights the situated, contingent, and mutually constitutive nature of these concepts, while exploring how consequential such framings can be for the lived experience of deaf persons and for theories of language broadly. First, while deafness can be defined as an inability to hear, and thus primarily as a matter of biological affordances and sensory ecologies, many deaf persons understand the parameters of deafness in ways that go beyond this framing. For example, the linguistic anthropological literature largely focuses on ethnographic cases in which understandings of the nature of deafness are grounded in the use of sign language and engagement in sociality with other deaf signers, rather than in audiological status per se. Of course, biological and sign language-oriented definitions of deafness themselves differ within and across cultural contexts and do not encompass all variation in how deafness may be construed; linguistic anthropologists seek to further explore ethnographic variation and change in the ways that people conceive of and respond to deaf, hearing, and other related statuses. Likewise, defining what is meant by “language” in the term “deaf language” is a complex endeavor. Depending on the framing of deafness adopted, “deaf language” may