All About Hunting Sirens: A Gender-Flipped Little Mermaid

You may notice that in this book, the majority of the dialogue is written in italics, not in quotation marks. This is because Treva is profoundly Deaf and uses sign language to communicate. Any character signing will use italics, and any spoken words will be in quotation marks. 

I wanted to note that Deaf is capitalized. This is intentional and is not a grammatical error. Often, the word Deaf will be capitalized to indicate that an individual is fully immersed in the Deaf community (fluent in sign language, associate with other Deaf individuals on a regular basis, etc). A small d in deaf is understood to mean that the individual, who could fall anywhere on the spectrum of hearing loss, is not fully integrated into the Deaf community.  

I am also aware that the grammar in sign language varies greatly from English grammar, but just as we would use whichever grammar structure the listener is familiar with, I have any signed language written using English grammar. So while the correct ASL grammar for a sentence like “I’m going to the store” is signed Store I go, to eliminate confusion for the readers, I elected to use English grammar.

Similarly, sign language is NOT a universal language. Each country’s signed language will differ from others, just as there are variations in spoken languages. In this book, however, the siren and human sign languages are mostly the same. It is briefly addressed in the book as to the reason they would be so similar.