This article looks at translanguaging practices in four Yucatec Maya communities with a high incidence of deafness in the peninsula of Yucatán, Mexico. Deaf and hearing community members draw from a broad spectrum of semiotic resources to interact with each other and with people from other villages in the region: they sign with different degrees of fluency, speak Yucatec Maya and/or Spanish, gesture, draw, point and incorporate objects in their physical surroundings. Human beings have a general tendency to communicate between and beyond different languages and modalities and to creatively adapt their semiotic repertoires to each other to negotiate meaning. On top of that, I show that sociolinguistic and cultural features of Yucatec Maya communities scaffold translanguaging practices. The rich inventory of conventional co-speech gestures of Yucatec Maya speakers, positive attitudes towards deafness and signed language and a critical amount of shared cultural knowledge facilitate communication between deaf and hearing and contribute to the emergence of similar sign languages in historically unrelated communities. The investigation of Yucatec Maya signing communities through a translanguaging lens allows us to critically deconstruct existing classifications of sign languages and varieties. Yucatec Maya Sign Languages are portrayed as a multi-layered network of different villages, families, generations and overlapping deaf and hearing spaces, where translanguaging takes place.

In this article, we examine various strategies used to express cardinal numbers in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs) from three historically unrelated communities in Yucatan, Mexico: Chican, Nohkop, and Cepeda Peraza. Our findings describe some numeral strategies, which remained unattested in previous accounts, and demonstrate that YMSL numerals exhibit patterns of systematic inter- and intracommunity variation as a result of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors. These patterns are still in process of becoming solidified and a high level of individual variation persists. The analysis of numerals in YMSLs provides us with an excellent opportunity to observe the emergence of sociolinguistic variation in young village sign languages. Our study is based on data from elicitation, natural conversations, and interviews, and takes into account several aspects: the influence of Yucatec Maya gestures on the formation of YMSL numeral signs, the regional and intracommunity distribution of numeral signs and numeral strategies, the impact of literacy on YMSL number - expression, the existence of familylects and community members' language attitudes. Finally, we discuss some methodological challenges to studying variation in rural sign languages.

Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs) areindigenous sign languages that emerged in Yucatec Maya (YM) villages with a high incidence of deafness.YMSLs are used by deaf and hearing community members, resulting in closelanguage contact between YMSLs and spoken YM. This study investigates howconventional gestures of hearing YM become incorporated into YMSLs andundergo processes of grammaticalisation.Speakers of Mesoamerican languages use a range of “manualclassifiers” (Le Guen, in prep; Zavala, 2000) with specific hand configurationsassigned to specific classes of referents, e.g. animals or plants (Meo-Zilio &Mejía, 1980). These gestures are highly conventionalised across speakers andform important raw material for sign languages emerging in these communities.