Semiotic Review 9: Images - article published April 2021 https://semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/69 Images and/as Language in Nepal’s Older and Vulnerable Deaf Person’s Project Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway erhoffma@oberlin.edu Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic research in Nepal’s Older and Vulnerable Deaf Person’s Project (ODP), this article explores the ways in which engagement with pictorial images in the ODP helped deaf elders cultivate the physical, semiotic, and pragmatic skills that underpin the reception and reproduction of conventionalized Nepali Sign Language (NSL) forms. This pedagogy emerged in part because local understandings of NSL as a named and objectified language have been grounded in pictorial illustrations of signers performing standardized lexical items in sign language dictionaries, posters, and primers. An analysis of an ODP session demonstrates how elders’ image-making practices in some cases worked to center their communicative practices on the standard lexical items in which local deaf sociality was grounded; in others cases it worked to exceed the relatively narrow view of NSL that these texts objectified. Analysis of these dynamics, along with my own use of pictorial images as a mode of generating, reflecting, and circulating analyses of language use, helps us consider the semiotic processes through which ideologies of image and language may be mutually constitutive, as well as how such a relationship can be regimented or unsettled. Keywords: sign languages, graphic anthropology, multimodality, semiotic ideologies Introduction On a chilly winter day in 2017, I joined a group of elderly deaf Nepalis for a meeting of the Older and Vulnerable Deaf Person’s Project (ODP). This program, hosted by the Kathmandu Association of the Deaf (KAD), provided material, social, and linguistic support to older deaf Nepalis, many of whom had not previously had an opportunity to fully acquire conventional signed or spoken languages. Leaders of the KAD established this program out of a “moral imperative” (Friedner and Kusters 2020: 32) to provide all deaf Nepalis an opportunity to participate in a deaf social life grounded in the use of Nepali Sign Language (NSL) (Hoffmann Dilloway 2016a; Green 2017; Graif 2018). Though the room was cold enough that many of us wore coats and knit caps, we had been warmed up by a round of hot tea and fried buffalo meat prepared in the KAD’s kitchen. As the plates were gathered for washing, the ODP instructor Rohan, 1 a deaf NSL signer, waved to attract our attention to the white board at the front of the room. While we had been eating, he had been drawing a large landscape with erasable markers, the image complete with mountains, a river, a small house, and other details typical of a Nepali village scene (Figure 1). Distributing paper and crayons to our