Stereotypes of Nationalities, and Signes for Nations in the Czech Sign Language

The methodology of exploring stereotypes in spoken languages has been described in Jerzy Bartmiński's papers in great detail.Bartmiński works with three types of data (linguistic, textual and empirical ones), which he uses to formulate a cognitive definition describing the stereotype of the explored phenomenon. This work is the first of its kind to attempt to apply this methodology to exploring ethnic stereotypes in the Czech Sign Language. Sign languages are visual-motoric by their nature and lack a written form, which brings certain difficulties when exploring textual data. Therefore, for the purpose of exploring stereotypes in these languages the aforementioned method had to be modified in numerous ways. It is especially the linguistic data which have become important here, along with the empirical ones to a certain extent. It turns out that the sought stereotypes are most frequently contained in the very form of the sign (in the so-called parameters, i.e. hand shape, location, movement etc.) or in modifications of its parameters. This is documented on ten different ethnic stereotypes in the Czech Sign Language.