I wonder if sign language would be "parole" according to Saussurian linguistics. After all, parole can be denied as
the "concrete" use of the language, the actual utterances. It is an external manifestation of langue. It is the usage of the system, but not the system.
It seems like a contradiction, but perhaps sign language is parole? (Even if sign language isn't as arbitrary as signs in language)
In the 1960’s, the linguist William Stokoe showed that the American Sign Language is a full fledged language, and subsequent linguistic studies confirmed that sign languages share all the characteristics of oral languages (expect the obvious sign/sound difference), and there is no reason to consider them differently. So ASL is “langue”, and the concrete signs used fore example in this video are “parole”, in a way similar to the analogue situations in English or any other language.
By sign languages, I mean of course the languages used by deaf communities. The common misunderstanding that they’re not true language, might come from the fact that it is common for people to express simple notions by gestures (finger-pointing, expressing you’re tired, etc.), but this kind of signs are not a sign language, they are at best the equivalents of utterance like “Oh !” and “Yummy !” in English !
By contrast, sign languages can really express any notion an oral language can. I can’t personally speak any sign language, but, to give an example which impressed me, I have seen a live translation in French Sign Language of a PhD defence on biophotonics, where notions ranging from axon anatomy to optical interfermometry were discussed.
