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Wikipedia

Sign language

May 07, 2023

This article is about primary sign languages of the deaf. For signed versions of spoken languages, see manually coded language.

Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon.[1] Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[2] although there are also similarities among different sign languages.

Two men and a woman signing American Sign Language (2008)
Preservation of the Sign Language, George W. Veditz (1913)

Linguists consider both spoken and signed communication to be types of natural language, meaning that both emerged through an abstract, protracted aging process and evolved over time without meticulous planning.[3] This is supported by the fact that there is substantial overlap between the neural substrates of sign and spoken language processing, despite the obvious differences in modality.[4] Sign language should not be confused with body language, a type of nonverbal communication.

Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages have developed as useful means of communication and form the core of local Deaf cultures. Although signing is used primarily by the deaf and hard of hearing, it is also used by hearing individuals, such as those unable to physically speak, those who have trouble with oral language due to a disability or condition (augmentative and alternative communication), and those with deaf family members including children of deaf adults.

The number of sign languages worldwide is not precisely known. Each country generally has its own native sign language; some have more than one. The 2021 edition of Ethnologue lists 150 sign languages,[5] while the SIGN-HUB Atlas of Sign Language Structures lists over 200 and notes that there are more which have not been documented or discovered yet.[6] As of 2021, Indo Sign Language is the most used sign language in the world, and Ethnologue ranks it as the 151st most "spoken" language in the world.[7]

Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition.[8]

Linguists distinguish natural sign languages from other systems that are precursors to them or obtained from them, such as constructed manual codes for spoken languages, home sign, "baby sign", and signs learned by non-human primates.

History

Main article: History of sign language
 
Juan Pablo Bonet, Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos ("Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak") (Madrid, 1620)

Groups of deaf people have used sign languages throughout history. One of the earliest written records of a sign language is from the fifth century BC, in Plato's Cratylus, where Socrates says: "If we hadn't a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn't we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?"[9] Until the 19th century, most of what is known about historical sign languages is limited to the manual alphabets (fingerspelling systems) that were invented to facilitate the transfer of words from a spoken language to a sign language, rather than documentation of the language itself. Debate around the monastic sign-language developed in the Middle Ages has come to regard it as a gestural system rather than a true sign language. [10]

The earliest records of contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the time of the Europeans' arrival there.[11] These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541.

Spanish monk Pedro Ponce de León (1520–1584) developed the first manual alphabet.[12] This alphabet was based, in whole or in part, on the simple hand gestures used by monks living in silence.

In 1620, Juan Pablo Bonet published Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos ('Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak') in Madrid.[13] It is considered the first modern treatise of sign language phonetics, setting out a method of oral education for deaf people and a manual alphabet.

 
Chirogram from Chirologia, 1644

In Britain, manual alphabets were also in use for a number of purposes, such as secret communication,[14] public speaking, or communication by or with deaf people.[15] In 1648, John Bulwer described "Master Babington", a deaf man proficient in the use of a manual alphabet, "contryved on the joynts of his fingers", whose wife could converse with him easily, even in the dark through the use of tactile signing.[16]

In 1680, George Dalgarno published Didascalocophus, or, The deaf and dumb mans tutor,[17] in which he presented his own method of deaf education, including an "arthrological" alphabet, where letters are indicated by pointing to different joints of the fingers and palm of the left hand. Arthrological systems had been in use by hearing people for some time;[18] some have speculated that they can be traced to early Ogham manual alphabets.[19][20]

The vowels of this alphabet have survived in the modern alphabets used in British Sign Language, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language. The earliest known printed pictures of consonants of the modern two-handed alphabet appeared in 1698 with Digiti Lingua (Latin for Language [or Tongue] of the Finger), a pamphlet by an anonymous author who was himself unable to speak.[21][22] He suggested that the manual alphabet could also be used by mutes, for silence and secrecy, or purely for entertainment. Nine of its letters can be traced to earlier alphabets, and 17 letters of the modern two-handed alphabet can be found among the two sets of 26 handshapes depicted.

Charles de La Fin published a book in 1692 describing an alphabetic system where pointing to a body part represented the first letter of the part (e.g. Brow=B), and vowels were located on the fingertips as with the other British systems.[23] He described such codes for both English and Latin.

By 1720, the British manual alphabet had found more or less its present form.[24] Descendants of this alphabet have been used by deaf communities (or at least in classrooms) in the former British colonies India, Australia, New Zealand, Uganda and South Africa, as well as the republics and provinces of the former Yugoslavia, Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean, Indonesia, Norway, Germany and the United States. During the Polygar Wars against the British, Veeran Sundaralingam communicated with Veerapandiya Kattabomman's mute younger brother, Oomaithurai, by using their own sign language.[clarification needed]

Frenchman Charles-Michel de l'Épée published his manual alphabet in the 18th century, which has survived largely unchanged in France and North America until the present time. In 1755, Abbé de l'Épée founded the first school for deaf children in Paris; Laurent Clerc was arguably its most famous graduate. Clerc went to the United States with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to found the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817.[25][26] Gallaudet's son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, founded a school for the deaf in 1857 in Washington, D.C., which in 1864 became the National Deaf-Mute College. Now called Gallaudet University, it is still the only liberal arts university for deaf people in the world.

Sign languages generally do not have any linguistic relation to the spoken languages of the lands in which they arise. The correlation between sign and spoken languages is complex and varies depending on the country more than the spoken language. For example, although Australia, English Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. all have English as their dominant language, American Sign Language (ASL), derived from French Sign Language,[26] is the main sign language used in the U.S. and English Canada, whereas the other three countries use varieties of British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language, unrelated to ASL.[27] Similarly, the sign languages of Spain and Mexico are very different, despite Spanish being the national language in each country,[28] and the sign language used in Bolivia is based on ASL rather than any sign language that is used in any other Spanish-speaking country.[29] Variations also arise within a 'national' sign language which do not necessarily correspond to dialect differences in the national spoken language; rather, they can usually be correlated to the geographic location of residential schools for the deaf.[30][31]

International Sign, formerly known as Gestuno, is used mainly at international deaf events such as the Deaflympics and meetings of the World Federation of the Deaf. While recent studies claim that International Sign is a kind of a pidgin, they conclude that it is more complex than a typical pidgin and indeed is more like a full sign language.[32][33] While the more commonly used term is International Sign, it is sometimes referred to as Gestuno,[34] International Sign Pidgin[33] or International Gesture (IG).[35] International Sign is a term used by the World Federation of the Deaf and other international organisations.

Linguistics

In linguistic terms, sign languages are as rich and complex as any spoken language, despite the common misconception that they are not "real languages". Professional linguists have studied many sign languages and found that they exhibit the fundamental properties that exist in all languages.[36][1][37] Such fundamental properties include duality of patterning[38] and recursion.[39] Duality of patterning means that languages are composed of smaller, meaningless units which can be combined into larger units with meaning (see below). The term recursion means that languages exhibit grammatical rules and the output of such a rule can be the input of the same rule. It is, for example, possible in sign languages to create subordinate clauses and a subordinate clause may contain another subordinate clause.

Sign languages are not mime—in other words, signs are conventional, often arbitrary and do not necessarily have a visual relationship to their referent, much as most spoken language is not onomatopoeic. While iconicity is more systematic and widespread in sign languages than in spoken ones, the difference is not categorical.[40] The visual modality allows the human preference for close connections between form and meaning, present but suppressed in spoken languages, to be more fully expressed.[41] This does not mean that sign languages are a visual rendition of a spoken language. They have complex grammars of their own and can be used to discuss any topic, from the simple and concrete to the lofty and abstract. Sign languages are not inventions of educators, or ciphers of the spoken language of the surrounding community.[42]

Sign languages, like spoken languages, organize elementary, meaningless units into meaningful semantic units. This type of organization in natural language is often called duality of patterning. As in spoken languages, these meaningless units are represented as (combinations of) features, although coarser descriptions are often also made in terms of five "parameters": handshape (or handform), orientation, location (or place of articulation), movement, and non-manual expression. (These meaningless units in sign languages were initially called cheremes,[43] from the Greek word for hand, by analogy to the phonemes, from Greek for voice, of spoken languages. Now they are sometimes called phonemes when describing sign languages too, since the function is the same, but more commonly discussed in terms of "features"[1] or "parameters".)[44] More generally, both sign and spoken languages share the characteristics that linguists have found in all natural human languages, such as transitoriness, semanticity, arbitrariness, productivity, and cultural transmission.[clarification needed]

Common linguistic features of many sign languages are the occurrence of classifier constructions, a high degree of inflection by means of changes of movement, and a topic-comment syntax. More than spoken languages, sign languages can convey meaning by simultaneous means, e.g. by the use of space, two manual articulators, and the signer's face and body. Though there is still much discussion on the topic of iconicity in sign languages, classifiers are generally considered to be highly iconic, as these complex constructions "function as predicates that may express any or all of the following: motion, position, stative-descriptive, or handling information".[45] It needs to be noted that the term classifier is not used by everyone working on these constructions. Across the field of sign language linguistics the same constructions are also referred with other terms such as depictive signs.

Today, linguists study sign languages as true languages, part of the field of linguistics. However, the category "sign languages" was not added to the Linguistic Bibliography/Bibliographie Linguistique until the 1988 volume,[46] when it appeared with 39 entries.

Relationships with spoken languages

 
Sign language relief sculpture on a stone wall: "Life is beautiful, be happy and love each other", by Czech sculptor Zuzana Čížková on Holečkova Street in Prague-Smíchov, by a school for the deaf

There is a common misconception[47] that sign languages are somehow dependent on spoken languages: that they are spoken language expressed in signs, or that they were invented by hearing people.[48] Similarities in language processing in the brain between signed and spoken languages further perpetuated this misconception. Hearing teachers in deaf schools, such as Charles-Michel de l'Épée or Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, are often incorrectly referred to as "inventors" of sign language. Instead, sign languages, like all natural languages, are developed by the people who use them, in this case, deaf people, who may have little or no knowledge of any spoken language.

As a sign language develops, it sometimes borrows elements from spoken languages, just as all languages borrow from other languages that they are in contact with. Sign languages vary in how much they borrow from spoken languages. In many sign languages, a manual alphabet (fingerspelling) may be used in signed communication to borrow a word from a spoken language, by spelling out the letters. This is most commonly used for proper names of people and places; it is also used in some languages for concepts for which no sign is available at that moment, particularly if the people involved are to some extent bilingual in the spoken language. Fingerspelling can sometimes be a source of new signs, such as initialized signs, in which the handshape represents the first letter of a spoken word with the same meaning.

A January 2021 Welsh Government video informing viewers of their new COVID-19 regulations

On the whole, though, sign languages are independent of spoken languages and follow their own paths of development. For example, British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of the United Kingdom and the United States share the same spoken language. The grammars of sign languages do not usually resemble those of spoken languages used in the same geographical area; in fact, in terms of syntax, ASL shares more with spoken Japanese than it does with English.[49]

Similarly, countries which use a single spoken language throughout may have two or more sign languages, or an area that contains more than one spoken language might use only one sign language. South Africa, which has 11 official spoken languages and a similar number of other widely used spoken languages, is a good example of this. It has only one sign language with two variants due to its history of having two major educational institutions for the deaf which have served different geographic areas of the country.

Spatial grammar and simultaneity

Hello in ASL (American Sign Language)
Another variation of hello in ASL (American Sign Language)

Sign languages exploit the unique features of the visual medium (sight), but may also exploit tactile features (tactile sign languages). Spoken language is by and large linear; only one sound can be made or received at a time. Sign language, on the other hand, is visual and, hence, can use a simultaneous expression, although this is limited articulatorily and linguistically. Visual perception allows processing of simultaneous information.

One way in which many sign languages take advantage of the spatial nature of the language is through the use of classifiers. Classifiers allow a signer to spatially show a referent's type, size, shape, movement, or extent.

The large focus on the possibility of simultaneity in sign languages in contrast to spoken languages is sometimes exaggerated, though. The use of two manual articulators is subject to motor constraints, resulting in a large extent of symmetry[50] or signing with one articulator only. Further, sign languages, just like spoken languages, depend on linear sequencing of signs to form sentences; the greater use of simultaneity is mostly seen in the morphology (internal structure of individual signs).

Non-manual elements

Main article: Nonmanual feature

Sign languages convey much of their prosody through non-manual elements. Postures or movements of the body, head, eyebrows, eyes, cheeks, and mouth are used in various combinations to show several categories of information, including lexical distinction, grammatical structure, adjectival or adverbial content, and discourse functions.

At the lexical level, signs can be lexically specified for non-manual elements in addition to the manual articulation. For instance, facial expressions may accompany verbs of emotion, as in the sign for angry in Czech Sign Language. Non-manual elements may also be lexically contrastive. For example, in ASL (American Sign Language), facial components distinguish some signs from other signs. An example is the sign translated as not yet, which requires that the tongue touch the lower lip and that the head rotate from side to side, in addition to the manual part of the sign. Without these features the sign would be interpreted as late.[51] Mouthings, which are (parts of) spoken words accompanying lexical signs, can also be contrastive, as in the manually identical signs for doctor and battery in Sign Language of the Netherlands.[52]

While the content of a signed sentence is produced manually, many grammatical functions are produced non-manually (i.e., with the face and the torso).[53] Such functions include questions, negation, relative clauses and topicalization.[54] ASL and BSL use similar non-manual marking for yes/no questions, for example. They are shown through raised eyebrows and a forward head tilt.[55][56]

Some adjectival and adverbial information is conveyed through non-manual elements, but what these elements are varies from language to language. For instance, in ASL a slightly open mouth with the tongue relaxed and visible in the corner of the mouth means 'carelessly', but a similar non-manual in BSL means 'boring' or 'unpleasant'.[56]

Discourse functions such as turn taking are largely regulated through head movement and eye gaze. Since the addressee in a signed conversation must be watching the signer, a signer can avoid letting the other person have a turn by not looking at them, or can indicate that the other person may have a turn by making eye contact.[57]

Iconicity

Iconicity is similarity or analogy between the form of a sign (linguistic or otherwise) and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness. The first studies on iconicity in ASL were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many early sign language linguists rejected the notion that iconicity was an important aspect of sign languages, considering most perceived iconicity to be extralinguistic.[58][36] However, mimetic aspects of sign language (signs that imitate, mimic, or represent) are found in abundance across a wide variety of sign languages. For example, when deaf children learning sign language try to express something but do not know the associated sign, they will often invent an iconic sign that displays mimetic properties.[59] Though it never disappears from a particular sign language, iconicity is gradually weakened as forms of sign languages become more customary and are subsequently grammaticized. As a form becomes more conventional, it becomes disseminated in a methodical way phonologically to the rest of the sign language community.[60] Nancy Frishberg concluded that though originally present in many signs, iconicity is degraded over time through the application of natural grammatical processes.[58]

In 1978, psychologist Roger Brown was one of the first to suggest that the properties of ASL give it a clear advantage in terms of learning and memory.[61] In his study, Brown found that when a group of six hearing children were taught signs that had high levels of iconic mapping they were significantly more likely to recall the signs in a later memory task than another group of six children that were taught signs that had little or no iconic properties. In contrast to Brown, linguists Elissa Newport and Richard Meier found that iconicity "appears to have virtually no impact on the acquisition of American Sign Language".[62]

A central task for the pioneers of sign language linguistics was trying to prove that ASL was a real language and not merely a collection of gestures or "English on the hands." One of the prevailing beliefs at this time was that 'real languages' must consist of an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning. Thus, if ASL consisted of signs that had iconic form-meaning relationship, it could not be considered a real language. As a result, iconicity as a whole was largely neglected in research of sign languages for a long time. However, iconicity also plays a role in many spoken languages. Spoken Japanese for example exhibits many words mimicking the sounds of their potential referents (see Japanese sound symbolism). Later researchers, thus, acknowledged that natural languages do not need to consist of an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning.[63] The visual nature of sign language simply allows for a greater degree of iconicity compared to spoken languages as most real-world objects can be described by a prototypical shape (e.g., a table usually has a flat surface), but most real-world objects do not make prototypical sounds that can be mimicked by spoken languages (e.g., tables do not make prototypical sounds). It has to be noted, however, that sign languages are not fully iconic. On the one hand, there are also many arbitrary signs in sign languages and, on the other hand, the grammar of a sign language puts limits to the degree of iconicity: All known sign languages, for example, express lexical concepts via manual signs. From a truly iconic language one would expect that a concept like smiling would be expressed by mimicking a smile (i.e., by performing a smiling face). All known sign languages, however, do not express the concept of smiling by a smiling face, but by a manual sign.[64]

The cognitive linguistics perspective rejects a more traditional definition of iconicity as a relationship between linguistic form and a concrete, real-world referent. Rather it is a set of selected correspondences between the form and meaning of a sign.[41] In this view, iconicity is grounded in a language user's mental representation ("construal" in cognitive grammar). It is defined as a fully grammatical and central aspect of a sign language rather than a peripheral phenomenon.[65]

The cognitive linguistics perspective allows for some signs to be fully iconic or partially iconic given the number of correspondences between the possible parameters of form and meaning.[66] In this way, the Israeli Sign Language (ISL) sign for ask has parts of its form that are iconic ("movement away from the mouth" means "something coming from the mouth"), and parts that are arbitrary (the handshape, and the orientation).[67]

Many signs have metaphoric mappings as well as iconic or metonymic ones. For these signs there are three-way correspondences between a form, a concrete source and an abstract target meaning. The ASL sign LEARN has this three-way correspondence. The abstract target meaning is "learning". The concrete source is putting objects into the head from books. The form is a grasping hand moving from an open palm to the forehead. The iconic correspondence is between form and concrete source. The metaphorical correspondence is between concrete source and abstract target meaning. Because the concrete source is connected to two correspondences linguistics refer to metaphorical signs as "double mapped".[41][66][67]

Classification

See also: List of sign languages
 
The classification of Sign Language families
  French Sign Language family
  →American Sign Language (ASL) cluster
  →Russian Sign Language cluster
  →Czech Sign Language cluster
  Danish Sign Language family
  Swedish Sign Language family
  German Sign Language family
  Vietnamese sign languages & some Thai and Lao SLs
  Arab sign-language family
  Indo-Pakistani Sign Language
  Chinese Sign Language
  Japanese Sign Language family
  BANZSL family (British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language)
  South African Sign Language (within the BANZSL family)
  Isolated languages
  No data

Although sign languages have emerged naturally in deaf communities alongside or among spoken languages, they are unrelated to spoken languages and have different grammatical structures at their core.

Sign languages may be classified by how they arise.

In non-signing communities, home sign is not a full language, but closer to a pidgin. Home sign is amorphous and generally idiosyncratic to a particular family, where a deaf child does not have contact with other deaf children and is not educated in sign. Such systems are not generally passed on from one generation to the next. Where they are passed on, creolization would be expected to occur, resulting in a full language. However, home sign may also be closer to full language in communities where the hearing population has a gestural mode of language; examples include various Australian Aboriginal sign languages and gestural systems across West Africa, such as Mofu-Gudur in Cameroon.

A village sign language is a local indigenous language that typically arises over several generations in a relatively insular community with a high incidence of deafness, and is used both by the deaf and by a significant portion of the hearing community, who have deaf family and friends.[68] The most famous of these is probably the extinct Martha's Vineyard Sign Language of the U.S., but there are also numerous village languages scattered throughout Africa, Asia, and America.

Deaf-community sign languages, on the other hand, arise where deaf people come together to form their own communities. These include school sign, such as Nicaraguan Sign Language, which develop in the student bodies of deaf schools which do not use sign as a language of instruction, as well as community languages such as Bamako Sign Language, which arise where generally uneducated deaf people congregate in urban centers for employment. At first, Deaf-community sign languages are not generally known by the hearing population, in many cases not even by close family members. However, they may grow, in some cases becoming a language of instruction and receiving official recognition, as in the case of ASL.

Both contrast with speech-taboo languages such as the various Aboriginal Australian sign languages, which are developed by the hearing community and only used secondarily by the deaf. It is doubtful whether most of these are languages in their own right, rather than manual codes of spoken languages, though a few such as Yolngu Sign Language are independent of any particular spoken language. Hearing people may also develop sign to communicate with users of other languages, as in Plains Indian Sign Language; this was a contact signing system or pidgin that was evidently not used by deaf people in the Plains nations, though it presumably influenced home sign.

Language contact and creolization is common in the development of sign languages, making clear family classifications difficult – it is often unclear whether lexical similarity is due to borrowing or a common parent language, or whether there was one or several parent languages, such as several village languages merging into a Deaf-community language. Contact occurs between sign languages, between sign and spoken languages (contact sign, a kind of pidgin), and between sign languages and gestural systems used by the broader community. One author has speculated that Adamorobe Sign Language, a village sign language of Ghana, may be related to the "gestural trade jargon used in the markets throughout West Africa", in vocabulary and areal features including prosody and phonetics.[69][70]

 
Young students learn some words of Lao sign language from Suliphone, a deaf artist. This was one of several activities at a school book party sponsored by Big Brother Mouse, a literacy project in Laos where Suliphone works.

The only comprehensive classification along these lines going beyond a simple listing of languages dates back to 1991.[74] The classification is based on the 69 sign languages from the 1988 edition of Ethnologue that were known at the time of the 1989 conference on sign languages in Montreal and 11 more languages the author added after the conference.[76]

Wittmann classification of sign languages
Primary
language 		Primary
group 		Auxiliary
language 		Auxiliary
group
Prototype-A[77] 5 1 7 2
Prototype-R[78] 18 1 1 –
BSL-derived 8 – – –
DGS-derived 1 or 2 – – –
JSL-derived 2

–

– –
LSF-derived 30 – – –
LSG-derived

1?

– – –

In his classification, the author distinguishes between primary and auxiliary sign languages[79] as well as between single languages and names that are thought to refer to more than one language.[80] The prototype-A class of languages includes all those sign languages that seemingly cannot be derived from any other language.[77] Prototype-R languages are languages that are remotely modelled on a prototype-A language (in many cases thought to have been French Sign Language) by a process Kroeber (1940) called "stimulus diffusion".[78] The families of BSL, DGS, JSL, LSF (and possibly LSG) were the products of creolization and relexification of prototype languages.[81] Creolization is seen as enriching overt morphology in sign languages, as compared to reducing overt morphology in spoken languages.[82]

Typology

See also: Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology (going back to Edward Sapir) is based on word structure and distinguishes morphological classes such as agglutinating/concatenating, inflectional, polysynthetic, incorporating, and isolating ones.

Sign languages vary in word-order typology. For example, Austrian Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language and Indo-Pakistani Sign Language are Subject-object-verb while ASL is Subject-verb-object. Influence from the surrounding spoken languages is not improbable.

Sign languages tend to be incorporating classifier languages, where a classifier handshape representing the object is incorporated into those transitive verbs which allow such modification. For a similar group of intransitive verbs (especially motion verbs), it is the subject which is incorporated. Only in a very few sign languages (for instance Japanese Sign Language) are agents ever incorporated. In this way, since subjects of intransitives are treated similarly to objects of transitives, incorporation in sign languages can be said to follow an ergative pattern.

Brentari[83][84] classifies sign languages as a whole group determined by the medium of communication (visual instead of auditory) as one group with the features monosyllabic and polymorphemic. That means, that one syllable (i.e. one word, one sign) can express several morphemes, e.g., subject and object of a verb determine the direction of the verb's movement (inflection).

Another aspect of typology that has been studied in sign languages is their systems for cardinal numbers.[85] Typologically significant differences have been found between sign languages.

Acquisition

See also: Language acquisition

Children who are exposed to a sign language from birth will acquire it, just as hearing children acquire their native spoken language.[86]

The Critical Period hypothesis suggests that language, spoken or signed, is more easily acquired as a child at a young age versus an adult because of the plasticity of the child's brain. In a study done at the University of McGill, they found that American Sign Language users who acquired the language natively (from birth) performed better when asked to copy videos of ASL sentences than ASL users who acquired the language later in life. They also found that there are differences in the grammatical morphology of ASL sentences between the two groups, all suggesting that there is a very important critical period in learning signed languages.[87]

The acquisition of non-manual features follows an interesting pattern: When a word that always has a particular non-manual feature associated with it (such as a wh-question word) is learned, the non-manual aspects are attached to the word but do not have the flexibility associated with adult use. At a certain point, the non-manual features are dropped and the word is produced with no facial expression. After a few months, the non-manuals reappear, this time being used the way adult signers would use them.[88]

Written forms

Sign languages do not have a traditional or formal written form. Many deaf people do not see a need to write their own language.[89]

Several ways to represent sign languages in written form have been developed.

  • Stokoe notation, devised by Dr. William Stokoe for his 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language,[90] is an abstract phonemic notation system. Designed specifically for representing the use of the hands, it has no way of expressing facial expression or other non-manual features of sign languages. However, his was designed for research, particularly in a dictionary, not for general use.
  • The Hamburg Notation System (HamNoSys), developed in the early 1990s, is a detailed phonetic system, not designed for any one sign language, and intended as a transcription system for researchers rather than as a practical script.
  • David J. Peterson has attempted to create a phonetic transcription system for signing that is ASCII-friendly known as the Sign Language International Phonetic Alphabet (SLIPA).
  • SignWriting, developed by Valerie Sutton in 1974, is a system for representing sign languages phonetically (including mouthing, facial expression and dynamics of movement). The script is sometimes used for detailed research, language documentation, as well as publishing texts and works in sign languages.
  • si5s is another orthography which is largely phonemic. However, a few signs are logographs and/or ideographs due to regional variation in sign languages.
  • ASL-phabet is a system designed primarily for education of deaf children by Dr. Sam Supalla which uses a minimalist collection of symbols in the order of Handshape-Location-Movement. Many signs can be written the same way (homograph).
  • The Alphabetic Writing System for sign languages (Sistema de escritura alfabética, SEA, by its Spanish name and acronym), developed by linguist Ángel Herrero Blanco and two deaf researchers, Juan José Alfaro and Inmacualada Cascales, was published as a book in 2003[91] and made accessible in Spanish Sign Language on-line.[92] This system makes use of the letters of the Latin alphabet with a few diacritics to represent sign through the morphemic sequence S L C Q D F (bimanual sign, place, contact, handshape, direction and internal form). The resulting words are meant to be read by signing. The system is designed to be applicable to any sign language with minimal modification and to be usable through any medium without special equipment or software. Non-manual elements can be encoded to some extent, but the authors argue that the system does not need to represent all elements of a sign to be practical, the same way written oral language does not. The system has seen some updates which are kept publicly on a wiki page.[93] The Center for Linguistic Normalization of Spanish Sign Language has made use of SEA to transcribe all signs on its dictionary.[94]

So far, there is no consensus regarding the written form of sign language. Except for SignWriting, none are widely used. Maria Galea writes that SignWriting "is becoming widespread, uncontainable and untraceable. In the same way that works written in and about a well developed writing system such as the Latin script, the time has arrived where SW is so widespread, that it is impossible in the same way to list all works that have been produced using this writing system and that have been written about this writing system."[95] In 2015, the Federal University of Santa Catarina accepted a dissertation written in Brazilian Sign Language using Sutton SignWriting for a master's degree in linguistics. The dissertation "The Writing of Grammatical Non-Manual Expressions in Sentences in LIBRAS Using the SignWriting System" by João Paulo Ampessan states that "the data indicate the need for [non-manual expressions] usage in writing sign language".[96]

Sign perception

For a native signer, sign perception influences how the mind makes sense of their visual language experience. For example, a handshape may vary based on the other signs made before or after it, but these variations are arranged in perceptual categories during its development. The mind detects handshape contrasts but groups similar handshapes together in one category.[97][98][99] Different handshapes are stored in other categories. The mind ignores some of the similarities between different perceptual categories, at the same time preserving the visual information within each perceptual category of handshape variation.

In society

Deaf communities and Deaf culture

Main article: Deaf culture

When Deaf people constitute a relatively small proportion of the general population, Deaf communities often develop that are distinct from the surrounding hearing community.[100] These Deaf communities are very widespread in the world, associated especially with sign languages used in urban areas and throughout a nation, and the cultures they have developed are very rich.

One example of sign language variation in the Deaf community is Black ASL. This sign language was developed in the Black Deaf community as a variant during the American era of segregation and racism, where young Black Deaf students were forced to attend separate schools than their white Deaf peers.[101]

Use of sign languages in hearing communities

On occasion, where the prevalence of deaf people is high enough, a deaf sign language has been taken up by an entire local community, forming what is sometimes called a "village sign language"[102] or "shared signing community".[103] Typically this happens in small, tightly integrated communities with a closed gene pool. Famous examples include:

In such communities deaf people are generally well-integrated in the general community and not socially disadvantaged, so much so that it is difficult to speak of a separate "Deaf" community.[100]

Many Australian Aboriginal sign languages arose in a context of extensive speech taboos, such as during mourning and initiation rites. They are or were especially highly developed among the Warlpiri, Warumungu, Dieri, Kaytetye, Arrernte, and Warlmanpa, and are based on their respective spoken languages.

A sign language arose among tribes of American Indians in the Great Plains region of North America (see Plains Indian Sign Language) before European contact. It was used by hearing people to communicate among tribes with different spoken languages, as well as by deaf people. There are especially users today among the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho.

Sign language is also used as a form of alternative or augmentative communication by people who can hear but have difficulties using their voices to speak.[104]

Increasingly, hearing schools and universities are expressing interest in incorporating sign language. In the U.S., enrollment for ASL (American Sign Language) classes as part of students' choice of second language is on the rise.[105] In New Zealand, one year after the passing of NZSL Act 2006 in parliament, a NZSL curriculum was released for schools to take NZSL as an optional subject. The curriculum and teaching materials were designed to target intermediate schools from Years 7 to 10, (NZ Herald, 2007).

Legal recognition

Main article: Legal recognition of sign languages

Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition, while others have no status at all. Sarah Batterbury has argued that sign languages should be recognized and supported not merely as an accommodation for those with disabilities, but as the communication medium of language communities.[106]

Legal requirements covering sign language accessibility in media vary from country to country. In the United Kingdom, the Broadcasting Act 1996 addressed the requirements for blind and deaf viewers,[107] but has since been replaced by the Communications Act 2003.

Interpretation

Main article: Language interpretation § Sign language
 
A Polish Sign Language interpreter at the Przystanek Woodstock in 2017

In order to facilitate communication between deaf and hearing people, sign language interpreters are often used. Such activities involve considerable effort on the part of the interpreter, since sign languages are distinct natural languages with their own syntax, different from any spoken language.

The interpretation flow is normally between a sign language and a spoken language that are customarily used in the same country, such as French Sign Language (LSF) and spoken French in France, Spanish Sign Language (LSE) to spoken Spanish in Spain, British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English in the U.K., and American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English in the U.S. and most of anglophone Canada (since BSL and ASL are distinct sign languages both used in English-speaking countries), etc. Sign language interpreters who can translate between signed and spoken languages that are not normally paired (such as between LSE and English), are also available, albeit less frequently.

Video about access to cultural institutions in Mexico, with Mexican sign language interpretation and captions in Spanish

Sign language is sometimes provided for television programmes that include speech. The signer usually appears in the bottom corner of the screen, with the programme being broadcast full size or slightly shrunk away from that corner. Typically for press conferences such as those given by the Mayor of New York City, the signer appears to stage left or right of the public official to allow both the speaker and signer to be in frame at the same time. Live sign interpretation of important televised events is increasingly common but still an informal industry [108] In traditional analogue broadcasting, some programmes are repeated outside main viewing hours with a signer present.[109] Some emerging television technologies allow the viewer to turn the signer on and off in a similar manner to subtitles and closed captioning.[109]

Technology

 
A deaf person using a remote VRS interpreter to communicate with a hearing person

One of the first demonstrations of the ability for telecommunications to help sign language users communicate with each other occurred when AT&T's videophone (trademarked as the Picturephone) was introduced to the public at the 1964 New York World's Fair – two deaf users were able to freely communicate with each other between the fair and another city.[110] However, video communication did not become widely available until sufficient bandwidth for the high volume of video data became available in the early 2000s.

The Internet now allows deaf people to talk via a video link, either with a special-purpose videophone designed for use with sign language or with "off-the-shelf" video services designed for use with broadband and an ordinary computer webcam. The special videophones that are designed for sign language communication may provide better quality than 'off-the-shelf' services and may use data compression methods specifically designed to maximize the intelligibility of sign languages. Some advanced equipment enables a person to remotely control the other person's video camera, in order to zoom in and out or to point the camera better to understand the signing.

 
Video interpreter sign used at VRS/VRI service locations
Main articles: Video remote interpreting and Video relay service

Interpreters may be physically present with both parties to the conversation but, since the technological advancements in the early 2000s, provision of interpreters in remote locations has become available. In video remote interpreting (VRI), the two clients (a sign language user and a hearing person who wish to communicate with each other) are in one location, and the interpreter is in another. The interpreter communicates with the sign language user via a video telecommunications link, and with the hearing person by an audio link. VRI can be used for situations in which no on-site interpreters are available.

However, VRI cannot be used for situations in which all parties are speaking via telephone alone. With video relay service (VRS), the sign language user, the interpreter, and the hearing person are in three separate locations, thus allowing the two clients to talk to each other on the phone through the interpreter.

With recent developments in artificial intelligence in computer science, some recent deep learning based machine translation algorithms have been developed which automatically translate short videos containing sign language sentences (often simple sentence consists of only one clause) directly to written language.[111]

Sign Union flag

 
The Sign Union flag

The Sign Union flag was designed by Arnaud Balard. After studying flags around the world and vexillology principles for two years, Balard revealed the design of the flag, featuring the stylized outline of a hand. The three colors which make up the flag design are representative of Deafhood and humanity (dark blue), sign language (turquoise), and enlightenment and hope (yellow). Balard intended the flag to be an international symbol which welcomes deaf people.[112]

Language endangerment and extinction

As with any spoken language, sign languages are also vulnerable to becoming endangered.[113] For example, a sign language used by a small community may be endangered and even abandoned as users shift to a sign language used by a larger community, as has happened with Hawai'i Sign Language, which is almost extinct except for a few elderly signers.[114][115] Even nationally recognised sign languages can be endangered; for example, New Zealand Sign Language is losing users.[116] Methods are being developed to assess the language vitality of sign languages.[117]

Endangered sign languages
Extinct sign languages

Communication systems similar to sign language

There are a number of communication systems that are similar in some respects to sign languages, while not having all the characteristics of a full sign language, particularly its grammatical structure. Many of these are either precursors to natural sign languages or are derived from them.

Manual codes for spoken languages

Main article: Manually coded language

When Deaf and Hearing people interact, signing systems may be developed that use signs drawn from a natural sign language but used according to the grammar of the spoken language. In particular, when people devise one-for-one sign-for-word correspondences between spoken words (or even morphemes) and signs that represent them, the system that results is a manual code for a spoken language, rather than a natural sign language. Such systems may be invented in an attempt to help teach Deaf children the spoken language, and generally are not used outside an educational context.

"Baby sign language" with hearing children

Main article: Baby sign language

Some hearing parents teach signs to young hearing children. Since the muscles in babies' hands grow and develop quicker than their mouths, signs are seen as a beneficial option for better communication.[122] Babies can usually produce signs before they can speak.[citation needed] This reduces the confusion between parents when trying to figure out what their child wants. When the child begins to speak, signing is usually abandoned, so the child does not progress to acquiring the grammar of the sign language.[citation needed]

This is in contrast to hearing children who grow up with Deaf parents, who generally acquire the full sign language natively, the same as Deaf children of Deaf parents.

Home sign

Main article: Home sign

Informal, rudimentary sign systems are sometimes developed within a single family. For instance, when hearing parents with no sign language skills have a deaf child, the child may develop a system of signs naturally, unless repressed by the parents. The term for these mini-languages is home sign (sometimes "kitchen sign").[123]

Home sign arises due to the absence of any other way to communicate. Within the span of a single lifetime and without the support or feedback of a community, the child naturally invents signs to help meet his or her communication needs, and may even develop a few grammatical rules for combining short sequences of signs. Still, this kind of system is inadequate for the intellectual development of a child and it comes nowhere near meeting the standards linguists use to describe a complete language. No type of home sign is recognized as a full language.[124]

Primate use

Main article: Great ape language § Primate use of sign language

There have been several notable examples of scientists teaching signs to non-human primates in order to communicate with humans,[125] such as chimpanzees,[126][127][128][129][130][131][132] gorillas[133] and orangutans.[134] However, linguists generally point out that this does not constitute knowledge of a human language as a complete system, rather than simply signs/words.[135][136][137][138][139] Notable examples of animals who have learned signs include:

Gestural theory of human language origins

Main article: Origin of language § Gestural theory

One theory of the evolution of human language states that it developed first as a gestural system, which later shifted to speech.[140][141][142][143][70][144] An important question for this gestural theory is what caused the shift to vocalization.[145][146][147]

See also

References

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  76. ^ Wittmann's classification went into Ethnologue's database where it is still cited.[75] The subsequent edition of Ethnologue in 1992 went up to 81 sign languages, ultimately adopting Wittmann's distinction between primary and alternate sign languages (going back ultimately to Stokoe 1974) and, more vaguely, some other traits from his analysis. The 2013 version (17th edition) of Ethnologue is now up to 137 sign languages.
  77. ^ a b These are Adamorobe Sign Language, Armenian Sign Language, Australian Aboriginal sign languages, Hindu mudra, the Monastic sign languages, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, Plains Indian Sign Language, Urubú-Kaapor Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (Pakistani SL is said to be R, but Indian SL to be A, though they are the same language), Japanese Sign Language, and maybe the various Thai Hill-Country sign languages, French Sign Language, Lyons Sign Language, and Nohya Maya Sign Language. Wittmann also includes, bizarrely, Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
  78. ^ a b These are Providencia Island, Kod Tangan Bahasa Malaysia (manually signed Malay), German, Ecuadoran, Salvadoran, Gestuno, Indo-Pakistani (Pakistani SL is said to be R, but Indian SL to be A, though they are the same language), Kenyan, Brazilian, Spanish, Nepali (with possible admixture), Penang, Rennellese, Saudi, the various Sri Lankan sign languages, and perhaps BSL, Peruvian, Tijuana (spurious), Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan sign languages.
  79. ^ Wittmann adds that this taxonomic criterion is not really applicable with any scientific rigor: Auxiliary sign languages, to the extent that they are full-fledged natural languages (and therefore included in his survey) at all, are mostly used by the deaf as well, and some primary sign languages (such as ASL and Adamorobe Sign Language) have acquired auxiliary usages.
  80. ^ Wittmann includes in this class Australian Aboriginal sign languages (at least 14 different languages), Monastic sign language, Thai Hill-Country sign languages (possibly including languages in Vietnam and Laos), and Sri Lankan sign languages (14 deaf schools with different sign languages).
  81. ^ Wittmann's references on the subject, besides his own work on creolization and relexification in spoken languages, include papers such as Fischer (1974, 1978), Deuchar (1987) and Judy Kegl's pre-1991 work on creolization in sign languages.
  82. ^ Wittmann's explanation for this is that models of acquisition and transmission for sign languages are not based on any typical parent-child relation model of direct transmission which is inducive to variation and change to a greater extent. He notes that sign creoles are much more common than vocal creoles and that we can't know on how many successive creolizations prototype-A sign languages are based prior to their historicity.[clarification needed]
  83. ^ Brentari, Diane (1998) A prosodic model of sign language phonology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
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Bibliography

  • Aronoff, Mark; Meir, Irit; Sandler, Wendy (2005). "The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology". Language. 81 (2): 301–44. doi:10.1353/lan.2005.0043. PMC 3250214. PMID 22223926.
  • Branson, J., D. Miller, & I G. Marsaja. (1996). "Everyone here speaks sign language, too: a deaf village in Bali, Indonesia." In: C. Lucas (ed.): Multicultural aspects of sociolinguistics in deaf communities. Washington, Gallaudet University Press, pp. 39+
  • Deuchar, Margaret (1987). "Sign languages as creoles and Chomsky's notion of Universal Grammar." Essays in honor of Noam Chomsky, 81–91. New York: Falmer.
  • Emmorey, Karen; & Lane, Harlan L. (Eds.). (2000). The signs of language revisited: An anthology to honor Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-3246-7.
  • Fischer, Susan D. (1974). "Sign language and linguistic universals." Actes du Colloque franco-allemand de grammaire générative, 2.187–204. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  • Fischer, Susan D. (1978). "Sign languages and creoles". Siple. 1978: 309–31.
  • Goldin-Meadow, Susan (2003), The Resilience of Language: What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Can Tell Us About How All Children Learn Language, Psychology Press, a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis, New York, 2003
  • Gordon, Raymond, ed. (2008). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edition. SIL International, ISBN 978-1-55671-159-6, 1-55671-159-X. January 13, 2013, at the Wayback Machine Sections for primary sign languages Browse by Language Family and alternative ones Browse by Language Family.
  • Groce, Nora E. (1988). Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on Martha's Vineyard. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-27041-X.
  • Healy, Alice F. (1980). "Can Chimpanzees learn a phonemic language?" In: Sebeok, Thomas A. & Jean Umiker-Sebeok, eds, Speaking of apes: a critical anthology of two-way communication with man. New York: Plenum, 141–43.
  • Kamei, Nobutaka (2004). The Sign Languages of Africa, "Journal of African Studies" (Japan Association for African Studies) Vol. 64, March, 2004. [NOTE: Kamei lists 23 African sign languages in this article].
  • Kegl, Judy (1994). "The Nicaraguan Sign Language Project: An Overview". Signpost. 7 (1): 24–31.
  • Kegl, Judy, Senghas A., Coppola M (1999). "Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua." In: M. DeGraff (ed.), Comparative Grammatical Change: The Intersection of Language Acquisition, Creole Genesis, and Diachronic Syntax, pp. 179–237. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  • Kegl, Judy (2004). "Language Emergence in a Language-Ready Brain: Acquisition Issues." In: Jenkins, Lyle (ed.), Biolinguistics and the Evolution of Language. John Benjamins.
  • Kendon, Adam. (1988). Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, Semiotic and Communicative Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Kroeber, Alfred L. (1940). "Stimulus diffusion". American Anthropologist. 42: 1–20. doi:10.1525/aa.1940.42.1.02a00020.
  • Lane, Harlan L. (Ed.). (1984). The Deaf experience: Classics in language and education. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-19460-8.
  • Lane, Harlan L. (1984). When the mind hears: A history of the deaf. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-50878-5.
  • Madell, Samantha (1998). Warlpiri Sign Language and Auslan – A Comparison. M.A. Thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. June 8, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  • Madsen, Willard J. (1982), Intermediate Conversational Sign Language. Gallaudet University Press. ISBN 978-0-913580-79-0.
  • O'Reilly, S. (2005). Indigenous Sign Language and Culture; the interpreting and access needs of Deaf people who are of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in Far North Queensland. Sponsored by ASLIA, the Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association.
  • Padden, Carol; & Humphries, Tom. (1988). Deaf in America: Voices from a culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-19423-3.
  • Pfau, Roland, Markus Steinbach & Bencie Woll (eds.), Sign language. An international handbook (HSK – Handbooks of linguistics and communication science). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Poizner, Howard; Klima, Edward S.; & Bellugi, Ursula. (1987). What the hands reveal about the brain. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Premack, David, & Ann J. Premack (1983). The mind of an ape. New York: Norton.

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  • Sacks, Oliver W. (1989). Seeing voices: A journey into the world of the deaf. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06083-0.
  • Sandler, Wendy (2003). "Sign Language Phonology". In William Frawley (Ed.), The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics.[2]
  • Sandler, Wendy & Lillo-Martin, Diane (2001). "Natural sign languages". In M. Aronoff & J. Rees-Miller (Eds.), Handbook of linguistics (pp. 533–562). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-20497-0.
  • Stiles-Davis, Joan; Kritchevsky, Mark; & Bellugi, Ursula (Eds.). (1988). Spatial cognition: Brain bases and development. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-0046-8; ISBN 0-8058-0078-6.
  • Stokoe, William C. (1960, 1978). Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf. Studies in linguistics, Occasional papers, No. 8, Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University at Buffalo. 2d ed., Silver Spring: Md: Linstok Press.
  • Stokoe, William C. (1974). Classification and description of sign languages. Current Trends in Linguistics 12.345–71.
  • Twilhaar, Jan Nijen, and Beppie van den Bogaerde. 2016. Concise Lexicon for Sign Linguistics. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  • Valli, Clayton, Ceil Lucas, and Kristin Mulrooney. (2005) Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction, 4th Ed. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
  • Van Deusen-Phillips S.B., Goldin-Meadow S., Miller P.J., 2001. Enacting Stories, Seeing Worlds: Similarities and Differences in the Cross-Cultural Narrative Development of Linguistically Isolated Deaf Children, Human Development, Vol. 44, No. 6.
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Further reading

Academic journals related to sign languages

External links

Note: the articles for specific sign languages (e.g. ASL or BSL) may contain further external links, e.g. for learning those languages.

  • Langue:Signes du Monde, directory for all online Sign Languages dictionaries (in French and English)
  • The MUSSLAP Project, Multimodal Human Speech and Sign Language Processing for Human-Machine Communication
  • Mallery, Garrick. 1879–1880. Sign Language among North American Indians, by Garrick Mallery. Sign language among North American Indians compared with that among other peoples and deaf-mutes. A first annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution]. Project Gutenberg.
  • signlangtv.org, a project documenting sign language television shows for the deaf around the world
  • Sign language at Curlie

May 07, 2023
sign, language, this, article, about, primary, sign, languages, deaf, signed, versions, spoken, languages, manually, coded, language, also, known, signed, languages, languages, that, visual, manual, modality, convey, meaning, instead, spoken, words, expressed,. This article is about primary sign languages of the deaf For signed versions of spoken languages see manually coded language Sign languages also known as signed languages are languages that use the visual manual modality to convey meaning instead of spoken words Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non manual markers Sign languages are full fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon 1 Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible 2 although there are also similarities among different sign languages Two men and a woman signing American Sign Language 2008 source source source source source source Preservation of the Sign Language George W Veditz 1913 Linguists consider both spoken and signed communication to be types of natural language meaning that both emerged through an abstract protracted aging process and evolved over time without meticulous planning 3 This is supported by the fact that there is substantial overlap between the neural substrates of sign and spoken language processing despite the obvious differences in modality 4 Sign language should not be confused with body language a type of nonverbal communication Wherever communities of deaf people exist sign languages have developed as useful means of communication and form the core of local Deaf cultures Although signing is used primarily by the deaf and hard of hearing it is also used by hearing individuals such as those unable to physically speak those who have trouble with oral language due to a disability or condition augmentative and alternative communication and those with deaf family members including children of deaf adults The number of sign languages worldwide is not precisely known Each country generally has its own native sign language some have more than one The 2021 edition of Ethnologue lists 150 sign languages 5 while the SIGN HUB Atlas of Sign Language Structures lists over 200 and notes that there are more which have not been documented or discovered yet 6 As of 2021 Indo Sign Language is the most used sign language in the world and Ethnologue ranks it as the 151st most spoken language in the world 7 Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition 8 Linguists distinguish natural sign languages from other systems that are precursors to them or obtained from them such as constructed manual codes for spoken languages home sign baby sign and signs learned by non human primates Contents 1 History 2 Linguistics 2 1 Relationships with spoken languages 2 2 Spatial grammar and simultaneity 2 3 Non manual elements 2 4 Iconicity 2 5 Classification 2 6 Typology 2 7 Acquisition 2 8 Written forms 2 9 Sign perception 3 In society 3 1 Deaf communities and Deaf culture 3 2 Use of sign languages in hearing communities 3 3 Legal recognition 3 4 Interpretation 3 5 Technology 3 6 Sign Union flag 3 7 Language endangerment and extinction 4 Communication systems similar to sign language 4 1 Manual codes for spoken languages 4 2 Baby sign language with hearing children 4 3 Home sign 4 4 Primate use 4 5 Gestural theory of human language origins 5 See also 6 References 7 Bibliography 8 Further reading 9 Academic journals related to sign languages 10 External linksHistory EditMain article History of sign language Juan Pablo Bonet Reduccion de las letras y arte para ensenar a hablar a los mudos Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak Madrid 1620 Groups of deaf people have used sign languages throughout history One of the earliest written records of a sign language is from the fifth century BC in Plato s Cratylus where Socrates says If we hadn t a voice or a tongue and wanted to express things to one another wouldn t we try to make signs by moving our hands head and the rest of our body just as dumb people do at present 9 Until the 19th century most of what is known about historical sign languages is limited to the manual alphabets fingerspelling systems that were invented to facilitate the transfer of words from a spoken language to a sign language rather than documentation of the language itself Debate around the monastic sign language developed in the Middle Ages has come to regard it as a gestural system rather than a true sign language 10 The earliest records of contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the time of the Europeans arrival there 11 These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541 Spanish monk Pedro Ponce de Leon 1520 1584 developed the first manual alphabet 12 This alphabet was based in whole or in part on the simple hand gestures used by monks living in silence In 1620 Juan Pablo Bonet published Reduccion de las letras y arte para ensenar a hablar a los mudos Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak in Madrid 13 It is considered the first modern treatise of sign language phonetics setting out a method of oral education for deaf people and a manual alphabet Chirogram from Chirologia 1644 In Britain manual alphabets were also in use for a number of purposes such as secret communication 14 public speaking or communication by or with deaf people 15 In 1648 John Bulwer described Master Babington a deaf man proficient in the use of a manual alphabet contryved on the joynts of his fingers whose wife could converse with him easily even in the dark through the use of tactile signing 16 In 1680 George Dalgarno published Didascalocophus or The deaf and dumb mans tutor 17 in which he presented his own method of deaf education including an arthrological alphabet where letters are indicated by pointing to different joints of the fingers and palm of the left hand Arthrological systems had been in use by hearing people for some time 18 some have speculated that they can be traced to early Ogham manual alphabets 19 20 The vowels of this alphabet have survived in the modern alphabets used in British Sign Language Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language The earliest known printed pictures of consonants of the modern two handed alphabet appeared in 1698 with Digiti Lingua Latin for Language or Tongue of the Finger a pamphlet by an anonymous author who was himself unable to speak 21 22 He suggested that the manual alphabet could also be used by mutes for silence and secrecy or purely for entertainment Nine of its letters can be traced to earlier alphabets and 17 letters of the modern two handed alphabet can be found among the two sets of 26 handshapes depicted Charles de La Fin published a book in 1692 describing an alphabetic system where pointing to a body part represented the first letter of the part e g Brow B and vowels were located on the fingertips as with the other British systems 23 He described such codes for both English and Latin By 1720 the British manual alphabet had found more or less its present form 24 Descendants of this alphabet have been used by deaf communities or at least in classrooms in the former British colonies India Australia New Zealand Uganda and South Africa as well as the republics and provinces of the former Yugoslavia Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean Indonesia Norway Germany and the United States During the Polygar Wars against the British Veeran Sundaralingam communicated with Veerapandiya Kattabomman s mute younger brother Oomaithurai by using their own sign language clarification needed Frenchman Charles Michel de l Epee published his manual alphabet in the 18th century which has survived largely unchanged in France and North America until the present time In 1755 Abbe de l Epee founded the first school for deaf children in Paris Laurent Clerc was arguably its most famous graduate Clerc went to the United States with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to found the American School for the Deaf in Hartford Connecticut in 1817 25 26 Gallaudet s son Edward Miner Gallaudet founded a school for the deaf in 1857 in Washington D C which in 1864 became the National Deaf Mute College Now called Gallaudet University it is still the only liberal arts university for deaf people in the world Sign languages generally do not have any linguistic relation to the spoken languages of the lands in which they arise The correlation between sign and spoken languages is complex and varies depending on the country more than the spoken language For example although Australia English Canada New Zealand the U K and the U S all have English as their dominant language American Sign Language ASL derived from French Sign Language 26 is the main sign language used in the U S and English Canada whereas the other three countries use varieties of British Australian and New Zealand Sign Language unrelated to ASL 27 Similarly the sign languages of Spain and Mexico are very different despite Spanish being the national language in each country 28 and the sign language used in Bolivia is based on ASL rather than any sign language that is used in any other Spanish speaking country 29 Variations also arise within a national sign language which do not necessarily correspond to dialect differences in the national spoken language rather they can usually be correlated to the geographic location of residential schools for the deaf 30 31 International Sign formerly known as Gestuno is used mainly at international deaf events such as the Deaflympics and meetings of the World Federation of the Deaf While recent studies claim that International Sign is a kind of a pidgin they conclude that it is more complex than a typical pidgin and indeed is more like a full sign language 32 33 While the more commonly used term is International Sign it is sometimes referred to as Gestuno 34 International Sign Pidgin 33 or International Gesture IG 35 International Sign is a term used by the World Federation of the Deaf and other international organisations Linguistics EditIn linguistic terms sign languages are as rich and complex as any spoken language despite the common misconception that they are not real languages Professional linguists have studied many sign languages and found that they exhibit the fundamental properties that exist in all languages 36 1 37 Such fundamental properties include duality of patterning 38 and recursion 39 Duality of patterning means that languages are composed of smaller meaningless units which can be combined into larger units with meaning see below The term recursion means that languages exhibit grammatical rules and the output of such a rule can be the input of the same rule It is for example possible in sign languages to create subordinate clauses and a subordinate clause may contain another subordinate clause Sign languages are not mime in other words signs are conventional often arbitrary and do not necessarily have a visual relationship to their referent much as most spoken language is not onomatopoeic While iconicity is more systematic and widespread in sign languages than in spoken ones the difference is not categorical 40 The visual modality allows the human preference for close connections between form and meaning present but suppressed in spoken languages to be more fully expressed 41 This does not mean that sign languages are a visual rendition of a spoken language They have complex grammars of their own and can be used to discuss any topic from the simple and concrete to the lofty and abstract Sign languages are not inventions of educators or ciphers of the spoken language of the surrounding community 42 Sign languages like spoken languages organize elementary meaningless units into meaningful semantic units This type of organization in natural language is often called duality of patterning As in spoken languages these meaningless units are represented as combinations of features although coarser descriptions are often also made in terms of five parameters handshape or handform orientation location or place of articulation movement and non manual expression These meaningless units in sign languages were initially called cheremes 43 from the Greek word for hand by analogy to the phonemes from Greek for voice of spoken languages Now they are sometimes called phonemes when describing sign languages too since the function is the same but more commonly discussed in terms of features 1 or parameters 44 More generally both sign and spoken languages share the characteristics that linguists have found in all natural human languages such as transitoriness semanticity arbitrariness productivity and cultural transmission clarification needed Common linguistic features of many sign languages are the occurrence of classifier constructions a high degree of inflection by means of changes of movement and a topic comment syntax More than spoken languages sign languages can convey meaning by simultaneous means e g by the use of space two manual articulators and the signer s face and body Though there is still much discussion on the topic of iconicity in sign languages classifiers are generally considered to be highly iconic as these complex constructions function as predicates that may express any or all of the following motion position stative descriptive or handling information 45 It needs to be noted that the term classifier is not used by everyone working on these constructions Across the field of sign language linguistics the same constructions are also referred with other terms such as depictive signs Today linguists study sign languages as true languages part of the field of linguistics However the category sign languages was not added to the Linguistic Bibliography Bibliographie Linguistique until the 1988 volume 46 when it appeared with 39 entries Relationships with spoken languages Edit Sign language relief sculpture on a stone wall Life is beautiful be happy and love each other by Czech sculptor Zuzana Cizkova on Holeckova Street in Prague Smichov by a school for the deaf There is a common misconception 47 that sign languages are somehow dependent on spoken languages that they are spoken language expressed in signs or that they were invented by hearing people 48 Similarities in language processing in the brain between signed and spoken languages further perpetuated this misconception Hearing teachers in deaf schools such as Charles Michel de l Epee or Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet are often incorrectly referred to as inventors of sign language Instead sign languages like all natural languages are developed by the people who use them in this case deaf people who may have little or no knowledge of any spoken language As a sign language develops it sometimes borrows elements from spoken languages just as all languages borrow from other languages that they are in contact with Sign languages vary in how much they borrow from spoken languages In many sign languages a manual alphabet fingerspelling may be used in signed communication to borrow a word from a spoken language by spelling out the letters This is most commonly used for proper names of people and places it is also used in some languages for concepts for which no sign is available at that moment particularly if the people involved are to some extent bilingual in the spoken language Fingerspelling can sometimes be a source of new signs such as initialized signs in which the handshape represents the first letter of a spoken word with the same meaning source source source source source source source source source source source source A January 2021 Welsh Government video informing viewers of their new COVID 19 regulations On the whole though sign languages are independent of spoken languages and follow their own paths of development For example British Sign Language BSL and American Sign Language ASL are quite different and mutually unintelligible even though the hearing people of the United Kingdom and the United States share the same spoken language The grammars of sign languages do not usually resemble those of spoken languages used in the same geographical area in fact in terms of syntax ASL shares more with spoken Japanese than it does with English 49 Similarly countries which use a single spoken language throughout may have two or more sign languages or an area that contains more than one spoken language might use only one sign language South Africa which has 11 official spoken languages and a similar number of other widely used spoken languages is a good example of this It has only one sign language with two variants due to its history of having two major educational institutions for the deaf which have served different geographic areas of the country Spatial grammar and simultaneity Edit source source source source source source Hello in ASL American Sign Language source source source source source source Another variation of hello in ASL American Sign Language Sign languages exploit the unique features of the visual medium sight but may also exploit tactile features tactile sign languages Spoken language is by and large linear only one sound can be made or received at a time Sign language on the other hand is visual and hence can use a simultaneous expression although this is limited articulatorily and linguistically Visual perception allows processing of simultaneous information One way in which many sign languages take advantage of the spatial nature of the language is through the use of classifiers Classifiers allow a signer to spatially show a referent s type size shape movement or extent The large focus on the possibility of simultaneity in sign languages in contrast to spoken languages is sometimes exaggerated though The use of two manual articulators is subject to motor constraints resulting in a large extent of symmetry 50 or signing with one articulator only Further sign languages just like spoken languages depend on linear sequencing of signs to form sentences the greater use of simultaneity is mostly seen in the morphology internal structure of individual signs Non manual elements Edit Main article Nonmanual feature Sign languages convey much of their prosody through non manual elements Postures or movements of the body head eyebrows eyes cheeks and mouth are used in various combinations to show several categories of information including lexical distinction grammatical structure adjectival or adverbial content and discourse functions At the lexical level signs can be lexically specified for non manual elements in addition to the manual articulation For instance facial expressions may accompany verbs of emotion as in the sign for angry in Czech Sign Language Non manual elements may also be lexically contrastive For example in ASL American Sign Language facial components distinguish some signs from other signs An example is the sign translated as not yet which requires that the tongue touch the lower lip and that the head rotate from side to side in addition to the manual part of the sign Without these features the sign would be interpreted as late 51 Mouthings which are parts of spoken words accompanying lexical signs can also be contrastive as in the manually identical signs for doctor and battery in Sign Language of the Netherlands 52 While the content of a signed sentence is produced manually many grammatical functions are produced non manually i e with the face and the torso 53 Such functions include questions negation relative clauses and topicalization 54 ASL and BSL use similar non manual marking for yes no questions for example They are shown through raised eyebrows and a forward head tilt 55 56 Some adjectival and adverbial information is conveyed through non manual elements but what these elements are varies from language to language For instance in ASL a slightly open mouth with the tongue relaxed and visible in the corner of the mouth means carelessly but a similar non manual in BSL means boring or unpleasant 56 Discourse functions such as turn taking are largely regulated through head movement and eye gaze Since the addressee in a signed conversation must be watching the signer a signer can avoid letting the other person have a turn by not looking at them or can indicate that the other person may have a turn by making eye contact 57 Iconicity Edit Iconicity is similarity or analogy between the form of a sign linguistic or otherwise and its meaning as opposed to arbitrariness The first studies on iconicity in ASL were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s Many early sign language linguists rejected the notion that iconicity was an important aspect of sign languages considering most perceived iconicity to be extralinguistic 58 36 However mimetic aspects of sign language signs that imitate mimic or represent are found in abundance across a wide variety of sign languages For example when deaf children learning sign language try to express something but do not know the associated sign they will often invent an iconic sign that displays mimetic properties 59 Though it never disappears from a particular sign language iconicity is gradually weakened as forms of sign languages become more customary and are subsequently grammaticized As a form becomes more conventional it becomes disseminated in a methodical way phonologically to the rest of the sign language community 60 Nancy Frishberg concluded that though originally present in many signs iconicity is degraded over time through the application of natural grammatical processes 58 In 1978 psychologist Roger Brown was one of the first to suggest that the properties of ASL give it a clear advantage in terms of learning and memory 61 In his study Brown found that when a group of six hearing children were taught signs that had high levels of iconic mapping they were significantly more likely to recall the signs in a later memory task than another group of six children that were taught signs that had little or no iconic properties In contrast to Brown linguists Elissa Newport and Richard Meier found that iconicity appears to have virtually no impact on the acquisition of American Sign Language 62 A central task for the pioneers of sign language linguistics was trying to prove that ASL was a real language and not merely a collection of gestures or English on the hands One of the prevailing beliefs at this time was that real languages must consist of an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning Thus if ASL consisted of signs that had iconic form meaning relationship it could not be considered a real language As a result iconicity as a whole was largely neglected in research of sign languages for a long time However iconicity also plays a role in many spoken languages Spoken Japanese for example exhibits many words mimicking the sounds of their potential referents see Japanese sound symbolism Later researchers thus acknowledged that natural languages do not need to consist of an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning 63 The visual nature of sign language simply allows for a greater degree of iconicity compared to spoken languages as most real world objects can be described by a prototypical shape e g a table usually has a flat surface but most real world objects do not make prototypical sounds that can be mimicked by spoken languages e g tables do not make prototypical sounds It has to be noted however that sign languages are not fully iconic On the one hand there are also many arbitrary signs in sign languages and on the other hand the grammar of a sign language puts limits to the degree of iconicity All known sign languages for example express lexical concepts via manual signs From a truly iconic language one would expect that a concept like smiling would be expressed by mimicking a smile i e by performing a smiling face All known sign languages however do not express the concept of smiling by a smiling face but by a manual sign 64 The cognitive linguistics perspective rejects a more traditional definition of iconicity as a relationship between linguistic form and a concrete real world referent Rather it is a set of selected correspondences between the form and meaning of a sign 41 In this view iconicity is grounded in a language user s mental representation construal in cognitive grammar It is defined as a fully grammatical and central aspect of a sign language rather than a peripheral phenomenon 65 The cognitive linguistics perspective allows for some signs to be fully iconic or partially iconic given the number of correspondences between the possible parameters of form and meaning 66 In this way the Israeli Sign Language ISL sign for ask has parts of its form that are iconic movement away from the mouth means something coming from the mouth and parts that are arbitrary the handshape and the orientation 67 Many signs have metaphoric mappings as well as iconic or metonymic ones For these signs there are three way correspondences between a form a concrete source and an abstract target meaning The ASL sign LEARN has this three way correspondence The abstract target meaning is learning The concrete source is putting objects into the head from books The form is a grasping hand moving from an open palm to the forehead The iconic correspondence is between form and concrete source The metaphorical correspondence is between concrete source and abstract target meaning Because the concrete source is connected to two correspondences linguistics refer to metaphorical signs as double mapped 41 66 67 Classification Edit See also List of sign languages The classification of Sign Language families French Sign Language family American Sign Language ASL cluster Russian Sign Language cluster Czech Sign Language cluster Danish Sign Language family Swedish Sign Language family German Sign Language family Vietnamese sign languages amp some Thai and Lao SLs Arab sign language family Indo Pakistani Sign Language Chinese Sign Language Japanese Sign Language family BANZSL family British Australian and New Zealand Sign Language South African Sign Language within the BANZSL family Isolated languages No data Although sign languages have emerged naturally in deaf communities alongside or among spoken languages they are unrelated to spoken languages and have different grammatical structures at their core Sign languages may be classified by how they arise In non signing communities home sign is not a full language but closer to a pidgin Home sign is amorphous and generally idiosyncratic to a particular family where a deaf child does not have contact with other deaf children and is not educated in sign Such systems are not generally passed on from one generation to the next Where they are passed on creolization would be expected to occur resulting in a full language However home sign may also be closer to full language in communities where the hearing population has a gestural mode of language examples include various Australian Aboriginal sign languages and gestural systems across West Africa such as Mofu Gudur in Cameroon A village sign language is a local indigenous language that typically arises over several generations in a relatively insular community with a high incidence of deafness and is used both by the deaf and by a significant portion of the hearing community who have deaf family and friends 68 The most famous of these is probably the extinct Martha s Vineyard Sign Language of the U S but there are also numerous village languages scattered throughout Africa Asia and America Deaf community sign languages on the other hand arise where deaf people come together to form their own communities These include school sign such as Nicaraguan Sign Language which develop in the student bodies of deaf schools which do not use sign as a language of instruction as well as community languages such as Bamako Sign Language which arise where generally uneducated deaf people congregate in urban centers for employment At first Deaf community sign languages are not generally known by the hearing population in many cases not even by close family members However they may grow in some cases becoming a language of instruction and receiving official recognition as in the case of ASL Both contrast with speech taboo languages such as the various Aboriginal Australian sign languages which are developed by the hearing community and only used secondarily by the deaf It is doubtful whether most of these are languages in their own right rather than manual codes of spoken languages though a few such as Yolngu Sign Language are independent of any particular spoken language Hearing people may also develop sign to communicate with users of other languages as in Plains Indian Sign Language this was a contact signing system or pidgin that was evidently not used by deaf people in the Plains nations though it presumably influenced home sign Language contact and creolization is common in the development of sign languages making clear family classifications difficult it is often unclear whether lexical similarity is due to borrowing or a common parent language or whether there was one or several parent languages such as several village languages merging into a Deaf community language Contact occurs between sign languages between sign and spoken languages contact sign a kind of pidgin and between sign languages and gestural systems used by the broader community One author has speculated that Adamorobe Sign Language a village sign language of Ghana may be related to the gestural trade jargon used in the markets throughout West Africa in vocabulary and areal features including prosody and phonetics 69 70 Young students learn some words of Lao sign language from Suliphone a deaf artist This was one of several activities at a school book party sponsored by Big Brother Mouse a literacy project in Laos where Suliphone works BSL Auslan and NZSL are usually considered to be a language known as BANZSL Maritime Sign Language and South African Sign Language are also related to BSL 71 Danish Sign Language and its descendants Norwegian Sign Language and Icelandic Sign Language are largely mutually intelligible with Swedish Sign Language Finnish Sign Language and Portuguese Sign Language derive from Swedish SL though with local admixture in the case of mutually unintelligible Finnish SL clarification needed Danish SL has French SL influence and Wittmann 1991 places them in that family 70 though he proposes that Swedish Finnish and Portuguese SL are instead related to British Sign Language Indian Sign Language ISL is similar to Pakistani Sign Language ISL fingerspelling uses both hands similarly to British Sign Language Japanese Sign Language Taiwanese Sign Language and Korean Sign Language are thought to be members of a Japanese Sign Language family 72 French Sign Language family There are a number of sign languages that emerged from French Sign Language LSF or are the result of language contact between local community sign languages and LSF These include French Sign Language Italian Sign Language Quebec Sign Language American Sign Language Irish Sign Language Russian Sign Language Dutch Sign Language NGT Spanish Sign Language Mexican Sign Language Brazilian Sign Language LIBRAS Catalan Sign Language Ukrainian Sign Language Austrian Sign Language along with its twin Hungarian Sign Language and its offspring Czech Sign Language and others A subset of this group includes languages that have been heavily influenced by American Sign Language ASL or are regional varieties of ASL Bolivian Sign Language is sometimes considered a dialect of ASL Thai Sign Language is a mixed language derived from ASL and the native sign languages of Bangkok and Chiang Mai and may be considered part of the ASL family Others possibly influenced by ASL include Ugandan Sign Language Kenyan Sign Language Philippine Sign Language and Malaysian Sign Language According to an SIL report 73 the sign languages of Russia Moldova and Ukraine share a high degree of lexical similarity and may be dialects of one language or distinct related languages The same report suggested a cluster of sign languages centered around Czech Sign Language Hungarian Sign Language and Slovak Sign Language This group may also include Romanian Bulgarian and Polish sign languages German Sign Language DGS gave rise to Polish Sign Language it also at least strongly influenced Israeli Sign Language though it is unclear whether the latter derives from DGS or from Austrian Sign Language which is in the French family The southern dialect of Chinese Sign Language gave rise to Hong Kong Sign Language spoken in Hong Kong and Macau Lyons Sign Language may be the source of Flemish Sign Language VGT though this is unclear Sign languages of Jordan Lebanon Syria Palestine and Iraq and possibly Saudi Arabia may be part of a sprachbund or may be one dialect of a larger Eastern Arabic Sign Language Known isolates include Nicaraguan Sign Language Turkish Sign Language Armenian Sign Language Kata Kolok Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language and Providence Island Sign Language The only comprehensive classification along these lines going beyond a simple listing of languages dates back to 1991 74 The classification is based on the 69 sign languages from the 1988 edition of Ethnologue that were known at the time of the 1989 conference on sign languages in Montreal and 11 more languages the author added after the conference 76 Wittmann classification of sign languages Primarylanguage Primarygroup Auxiliarylanguage AuxiliarygroupPrototype A 77 5 1 7 2Prototype R 78 18 1 1 BSL derived 8 DGS derived 1 or 2 JSL derived 2 LSF derived 30 LSG derived 1 In his classification the author distinguishes between primary and auxiliary sign languages 79 as well as between single languages and names that are thought to refer to more than one language 80 The prototype A class of languages includes all those sign languages that seemingly cannot be derived from any other language 77 Prototype R languages are languages that are remotely modelled on a prototype A language in many cases thought to have been French Sign Language by a process Kroeber 1940 called stimulus diffusion 78 The families of BSL DGS JSL LSF and possibly LSG were the products of creolization and relexification of prototype languages 81 Creolization is seen as enriching overt morphology in sign languages as compared to reducing overt morphology in spoken languages 82 Typology Edit See also Linguistic typology Linguistic typology going back to Edward Sapir is based on word structure and distinguishes morphological classes such as agglutinating concatenating inflectional polysynthetic incorporating and isolating ones Sign languages vary in word order typology For example Austrian Sign Language Japanese Sign Language and Indo Pakistani Sign Language are Subject object verb while ASL is Subject verb object Influence from the surrounding spoken languages is not improbable Sign languages tend to be incorporating classifier languages where a classifier handshape representing the object is incorporated into those transitive verbs which allow such modification For a similar group of intransitive verbs especially motion verbs it is the subject which is incorporated Only in a very few sign languages for instance Japanese Sign Language are agents ever incorporated In this way since subjects of intransitives are treated similarly to objects of transitives incorporation in sign languages can be said to follow an ergative pattern Brentari 83 84 classifies sign languages as a whole group determined by the medium of communication visual instead of auditory as one group with the features monosyllabic and polymorphemic That means that one syllable i e one word one sign can express several morphemes e g subject and object of a verb determine the direction of the verb s movement inflection Another aspect of typology that has been studied in sign languages is their systems for cardinal numbers 85 Typologically significant differences have been found between sign languages Acquisition Edit See also Language acquisition Children who are exposed to a sign language from birth will acquire it just as hearing children acquire their native spoken language 86 The Critical Period hypothesis suggests that language spoken or signed is more easily acquired as a child at a young age versus an adult because of the plasticity of the child s brain In a study done at the University of McGill they found that American Sign Language users who acquired the language natively from birth performed better when asked to copy videos of ASL sentences than ASL users who acquired the language later in life They also found that there are differences in the grammatical morphology of ASL sentences between the two groups all suggesting that there is a very important critical period in learning signed languages 87 The acquisition of non manual features follows an interesting pattern When a word that always has a particular non manual feature associated with it such as a wh question word is learned the non manual aspects are attached to the word but do not have the flexibility associated with adult use At a certain point the non manual features are dropped and the word is produced with no facial expression After a few months the non manuals reappear this time being used the way adult signers would use them 88 Written forms Edit Sign languages do not have a traditional or formal written form Many deaf people do not see a need to write their own language 89 Several ways to represent sign languages in written form have been developed Stokoe notation devised by Dr William Stokoe for his 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language 90 is an abstract phonemic notation system Designed specifically for representing the use of the hands it has no way of expressing facial expression or other non manual features of sign languages However his was designed for research particularly in a dictionary not for general use The Hamburg Notation System HamNoSys developed in the early 1990s is a detailed phonetic system not designed for any one sign language and intended as a transcription system for researchers rather than as a practical script David J Peterson has attempted to create a phonetic transcription system for signing that is ASCII friendly known as the Sign Language International Phonetic Alphabet SLIPA SignWriting developed by Valerie Sutton in 1974 is a system for representing sign languages phonetically including mouthing facial expression and dynamics of movement The script is sometimes used for detailed research language documentation as well as publishing texts and works in sign languages si5s is another orthography which is largely phonemic However a few signs are logographs and or ideographs due to regional variation in sign languages ASL phabet is a system designed primarily for education of deaf children by Dr Sam Supalla which uses a minimalist collection of symbols in the order of Handshape Location Movement Many signs can be written the same way homograph The Alphabetic Writing System for sign languages Sistema de escritura alfabetica SEA by its Spanish name and acronym developed by linguist Angel Herrero Blanco and two deaf researchers Juan Jose Alfaro and Inmacualada Cascales was published as a book in 2003 91 and made accessible in Spanish Sign Language on line 92 This system makes use of the letters of the Latin alphabet with a few diacritics to represent sign through the morphemic sequence S L C Q D F bimanual sign place contact handshape direction and internal form The resulting words are meant to be read by signing The system is designed to be applicable to any sign language with minimal modification and to be usable through any medium without special equipment or software Non manual elements can be encoded to some extent but the authors argue that the system does not need to represent all elements of a sign to be practical the same way written oral language does not The system has seen some updates which are kept publicly on a wiki page 93 The Center for Linguistic Normalization of Spanish Sign Language has made use of SEA to transcribe all signs on its dictionary 94 So far there is no consensus regarding the written form of sign language Except for SignWriting none are widely used Maria Galea writes that SignWriting is becoming widespread uncontainable and untraceable In the same way that works written in and about a well developed writing system such as the Latin script the time has arrived where SW is so widespread that it is impossible in the same way to list all works that have been produced using this writing system and that have been written about this writing system 95 In 2015 the Federal University of Santa Catarina accepted a dissertation written in Brazilian Sign Language using Sutton SignWriting for a master s degree in linguistics The dissertation The Writing of Grammatical Non Manual Expressions in Sentences in LIBRAS Using the SignWriting System by Joao Paulo Ampessan states that the data indicate the need for non manual expressions usage in writing sign language 96 Sign perception Edit For a native signer sign perception influences how the mind makes sense of their visual language experience For example a handshape may vary based on the other signs made before or after it but these variations are arranged in perceptual categories during its development The mind detects handshape contrasts but groups similar handshapes together in one category 97 98 99 Different handshapes are stored in other categories The mind ignores some of the similarities between different perceptual categories at the same time preserving the visual information within each perceptual category of handshape variation In society EditDeaf communities and Deaf culture Edit Main article Deaf culture When Deaf people constitute a relatively small proportion of the general population Deaf communities often develop that are distinct from the surrounding hearing community 100 These Deaf communities are very widespread in the world associated especially with sign languages used in urban areas and throughout a nation and the cultures they have developed are very rich One example of sign language variation in the Deaf community is Black ASL This sign language was developed in the Black Deaf community as a variant during the American era of segregation and racism where young Black Deaf students were forced to attend separate schools than their white Deaf peers 101 Use of sign languages in hearing communities Edit On occasion where the prevalence of deaf people is high enough a deaf sign language has been taken up by an entire local community forming what is sometimes called a village sign language 102 or shared signing community 103 Typically this happens in small tightly integrated communities with a closed gene pool Famous examples include Martha s Vineyard Sign Language United States Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language Israel Kata Kolok Bali Adamorobe Sign Language Ghana Yucatec Maya Sign Language MexicoIn such communities deaf people are generally well integrated in the general community and not socially disadvantaged so much so that it is difficult to speak of a separate Deaf community 100 Many Australian Aboriginal sign languages arose in a context of extensive speech taboos such as during mourning and initiation rites They are or were especially highly developed among the Warlpiri Warumungu Dieri Kaytetye Arrernte and Warlmanpa and are based on their respective spoken languages A sign language arose among tribes of American Indians in the Great Plains region of North America see Plains Indian Sign Language before European contact It was used by hearing people to communicate among tribes with different spoken languages as well as by deaf people There are especially users today among the Crow Cheyenne and Arapaho Sign language is also used as a form of alternative or augmentative communication by people who can hear but have difficulties using their voices to speak 104 Increasingly hearing schools and universities are expressing interest in incorporating sign language In the U S enrollment for ASL American Sign Language classes as part of students choice of second language is on the rise 105 In New Zealand one year after the passing of NZSL Act 2006 in parliament a NZSL curriculum was released for schools to take NZSL as an optional subject The curriculum and teaching materials were designed to target intermediate schools from Years 7 to 10 NZ Herald 2007 Legal recognition Edit Main article Legal recognition of sign languages Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition while others have no status at all Sarah Batterbury has argued that sign languages should be recognized and supported not merely as an accommodation for those with disabilities but as the communication medium of language communities 106 Legal requirements covering sign language accessibility in media vary from country to country In the United Kingdom the Broadcasting Act 1996 addressed the requirements for blind and deaf viewers 107 but has since been replaced by the Communications Act 2003 Interpretation Edit Main article Language interpretation Sign language A Polish Sign Language interpreter at the Przystanek Woodstock in 2017 In order to facilitate communication between deaf and hearing people sign language interpreters are often used Such activities involve considerable effort on the part of the interpreter since sign languages are distinct natural languages with their own syntax different from any spoken language The interpretation flow is normally between a sign language and a spoken language that are customarily used in the same country such as French Sign Language LSF and spoken French in France Spanish Sign Language LSE to spoken Spanish in Spain British Sign Language BSL and spoken English in the U K and American Sign Language ASL and spoken English in the U S and most of anglophone Canada since BSL and ASL are distinct sign languages both used in English speaking countries etc Sign language interpreters who can translate between signed and spoken languages that are not normally paired such as between LSE and English are also available albeit less frequently source source source source source source source source source source source source source source Video about access to cultural institutions in Mexico with Mexican sign language interpretation and captions in Spanish Sign language is sometimes provided for television programmes that include speech The signer usually appears in the bottom corner of the screen with the programme being broadcast full size or slightly shrunk away from that corner Typically for press conferences such as those given by the Mayor of New York City the signer appears to stage left or right of the public official to allow both the speaker and signer to be in frame at the same time Live sign interpretation of important televised events is increasingly common but still an informal industry 108 In traditional analogue broadcasting some programmes are repeated outside main viewing hours with a signer present 109 Some emerging television technologies allow the viewer to turn the signer on and off in a similar manner to subtitles and closed captioning 109 Technology Edit A deaf person using a remote VRS interpreter to communicate with a hearing person One of the first demonstrations of the ability for telecommunications to help sign language users communicate with each other occurred when AT amp T s videophone trademarked as the Picturephone was introduced to the public at the 1964 New York World s Fair two deaf users were able to freely communicate with each other between the fair and another city 110 However video communication did not become widely available until sufficient bandwidth for the high volume of video data became available in the early 2000s The Internet now allows deaf people to talk via a video link either with a special purpose videophone designed for use with sign language or with off the shelf video services designed for use with broadband and an ordinary computer webcam The special videophones that are designed for sign language communication may provide better quality than off the shelf services and may use data compression methods specifically designed to maximize the intelligibility of sign languages Some advanced equipment enables a person to remotely control the other person s video camera in order to zoom in and out or to point the camera better to understand the signing Video interpreter sign used at VRS VRI service locations Main articles Video remote interpreting and Video relay service Interpreters may be physically present with both parties to the conversation but since the technological advancements in the early 2000s provision of interpreters in remote locations has become available In video remote interpreting VRI the two clients a sign language user and a hearing person who wish to communicate with each other are in one location and the interpreter is in another The interpreter communicates with the sign language user via a video telecommunications link and with the hearing person by an audio link VRI can be used for situations in which no on site interpreters are available However VRI cannot be used for situations in which all parties are speaking via telephone alone With video relay service VRS the sign language user the interpreter and the hearing person are in three separate locations thus allowing the two clients to talk to each other on the phone through the interpreter With recent developments in artificial intelligence in computer science some recent deep learning based machine translation algorithms have been developed which automatically translate short videos containing sign language sentences often simple sentence consists of only one clause directly to written language 111 Sign Union flag Edit The Sign Union flagThe Sign Union flag was designed by Arnaud Balard After studying flags around the world and vexillology principles for two years Balard revealed the design of the flag featuring the stylized outline of a hand The three colors which make up the flag design are representative of Deafhood and humanity dark blue sign language turquoise and enlightenment and hope yellow Balard intended the flag to be an international symbol which welcomes deaf people 112 Language endangerment and extinction Edit As with any spoken language sign languages are also vulnerable to becoming endangered 113 For example a sign language used by a small community may be endangered and even abandoned as users shift to a sign language used by a larger community as has happened with Hawai i Sign Language which is almost extinct except for a few elderly signers 114 115 Even nationally recognised sign languages can be endangered for example New Zealand Sign Language is losing users 116 Methods are being developed to assess the language vitality of sign languages 117 Endangered sign languagesAdamorobe Sign Language AdaSL 118 Ban Khor Sign Language BKSL 118 Benkala Sign Language KK 118 Finland Swedish Sign Language FinSSL 119 Hawai i Sign Language HPSL 118 Inuit Sign Language IUR 120 Jamaican Country Sign Language KS 121 Maritime Sign Language MSL 118 Old Bangkok Sign Language OBSL 118 Old Chiangmai Sign Language OCSL 118 Plains Indian Sign Language PISL 118 Providencia Sign Language PSL 118 Rennellese Sign Language RSL 118 Extinct sign languagesAngami Naga Sign Language Henniker Sign Language Martha s Vineyard Sign Language MVSL Old French Sign Language VLSF Old Kentish Sign Language OKSL Pitta Pitta sign language Plateau Sign Language Sandy River Valley Sign Language Warluwarra sign languageCommunication systems similar to sign language EditThere are a number of communication systems that are similar in some respects to sign languages while not having all the characteristics of a full sign language particularly its grammatical structure Many of these are either precursors to natural sign languages or are derived from them Manual codes for spoken languages Edit Main article Manually coded language When Deaf and Hearing people interact signing systems may be developed that use signs drawn from a natural sign language but used according to the grammar of the spoken language In particular when people devise one for one sign for word correspondences between spoken words or even morphemes and signs that represent them the system that results is a manual code for a spoken language rather than a natural sign language Such systems may be invented in an attempt to help teach Deaf children the spoken language and generally are not used outside an educational context Baby sign language with hearing children Edit Main article Baby sign language Some hearing parents teach signs to young hearing children Since the muscles in babies hands grow and develop quicker than their mouths signs are seen as a beneficial option for better communication 122 Babies can usually produce signs before they can speak citation needed This reduces the confusion between parents when trying to figure out what their child wants When the child begins to speak signing is usually abandoned so the child does not progress to acquiring the grammar of the sign language citation needed This is in contrast to hearing children who grow up with Deaf parents who generally acquire the full sign language natively the same as Deaf children of Deaf parents Home sign Edit Main article Home sign Informal rudimentary sign systems are sometimes developed within a single family For instance when hearing parents with no sign language skills have a deaf child the child may develop a system of signs naturally unless repressed by the parents The term for these mini languages is home sign sometimes kitchen sign 123 Home sign arises due to the absence of any other way to communicate Within the span of a single lifetime and without the support or feedback of a community the child naturally invents signs to help meet his or her communication needs and may even develop a few grammatical rules for combining short sequences of signs Still this kind of system is inadequate for the intellectual development of a child and it comes nowhere near meeting the standards linguists use to describe a complete language No type of home sign is recognized as a full language 124 Primate use Edit Main article Great ape language Primate use of sign language There have been several notable examples of scientists teaching signs to non human primates in order to communicate with humans 125 such as chimpanzees 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 gorillas 133 and orangutans 134 However linguists generally point out that this does not constitute knowledge of a human language as a complete system rather than simply signs words 135 136 137 138 139 Notable examples of animals who have learned signs include Chimpanzees Washoe Nim Chimpsky and Loulis Gorillas Koko and MichaelGestural theory of human language origins Edit Main article Origin of language Gestural theory One theory of the evolution of human language states that it developed first as a gestural system which later shifted to speech 140 141 142 143 70 144 An important question for this gestural theory is what caused the shift to vocalization 145 146 147 See also EditAnimal language Body language Braille Fingerspelling Chereme Chinese number gestures Hearing loss Gang signal Gestures Intercultural competence International Sign Legal recognition of sign languages List of international common standards List of sign languages List of sign languages by number of native signers Manual communication Metacommunicative competence Modern Sign Language communication Origin of language Origin of speech Sign language glove Sign language in infants and toddlers Sign language media Sign Language Studies journal Sign name Sociolinguistics of sign languages Tactile signing Machine translation of sign languagesReferences Edit a b c Sandler Wendy amp Lillo Martin Diane 2006 Sign Language and Linguistic Universals Cambridge Cambridge University Press What is Sign Language Linguistic society Archived from the original on 13 February 2018 Retrieved 10 March 2018 E g Irit Meir Wendy Sandler Carol Padden and Mark Aronoff 2010 Emerging Sign Languages In Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer eds The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies Language and Education Vol 2 pp 267 80 Trettenbrein Patrick C Giorgio Papitto Angela D Friederici amp Emiliano Zaccarella 2021 Functional neuroanatomy of language without speech An ALE meta analysis of sign language Human Brain Mapping 42 3 699 712 https doi org 10 1002 hbm 25254 Eberhard David M Simons Gary F Fennig Charles D eds 2021 Sign language Ethnologue Languages of the World 24th ed SIL International retrieved 2021 05 15 Hosemann Jana Steinbach Markus eds 2021 Atlas of Sign Language Structures Sign hub archived from the original on 2021 04 13 retrieved 2021 01 13 What are the top 200 most spoken languages Ethnologue Wheatley Mark amp Annika Pabsch 2012 Sign Language Legislation in the European Union Edition II European Union of the Deaf Bauman Dirksen 2008 Open your eyes Deaf studies talking University of Minnesota Press ISBN 978 0 8166 4619 7 Stokoe William C Approaching Monastic Sign Language Sign Language Studies 58 1988 37 47 Sayers Edna Edith Lois Bragg Visual Kinetic Communication in Europe Before 1600 A Survey of Sign Lexicons and Finger Alphabets Prior to the Rise of Deaf Education Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2 1997 1 25 Bruce Scott G Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism The Cluniac Tradition C 900 1200 Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2007 Tirosh Yoav Deafness and Nonspeaking in Late Medieval Iceland 1200 1550 Viator 51 1 2020 311 344 Wurtzburg Susan and Campbell Lyle North American Indian Sign Language Evidence for its Existence before European Contact International Journal of American Linguistics Vol 61 No 2 Apr 1995 pp 153 167 Nielsen Kim 2012 A Disability History of the United States Boston Massachusetts Beacon Press ISBN 978 080702204 7 Pablo Bonet J de 1620 Reduction de las letras y Arte para ensenar a ablar los Mudos Ed Abarca de Angulo Madrid ejemplar facsimil accesible en la Reduction de las letras y arte para ensenar a ablar los mudos Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Archived from the original on 2021 10 04 Retrieved 2021 10 17 online Spanish scan of book Wilkins John 1641 Mercury the Swift and Silent Messenger The book is a work on cryptography and fingerspelling was referred to as one method of secret discoursing by signes and gestures Wilkins gave an example of such a system Let the tops of the fingers signifie the five vowels the middle parts the first five consonants the bottomes of them the five next consonants the spaces betwixt the fingers the foure next One finger laid on the side of the hand may signifie T Two fingers V the consonant Three W The little finger crossed X The wrist Y The middle of the hand Z 1641 116 117 John Bulwer s Chirologia or the natural language of the hand published in 1644 London mentions that alphabets are in use by deaf people although Bulwer presents a different system which is focused on public speaking Bulwer J 1648 Philocopus or the Deaf and Dumbe Mans Friend London Humphrey and Moseley Dalgarno George Didascalocophus or The deaf and dumb mans tutor Oxford Halton 1680 See Wilkins 1641 above Wilkins was aware that the systems he describes are old and refers to Bede s account of Roman and Greek finger alphabets Session 9 Bris ac uk 2000 11 07 Archived from the original on 2010 06 02 Retrieved 2010 09 28 Montgomery G 2002 The Ancient Origins of Sign Handshapes PDF Sign Language Studies 2 3 322 334 doi 10 1353 sls 2002 0010 JSTOR 26204860 S2CID 144243540 Moser Henry M O Neill John J Oyer Herbert J Wolfe Susan M Abernathy Edward A Schowe Ben M 1960 Historical Aspects of Manual Communication Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 25 2 145 151 doi 10 1044 jshd 2502 145 PMID 14424535 Hay A and Lee R 2004 A Pictorial History of the evolution of the British Manual Alphabet British Deaf History Society Publications Middlesex Charles de La Fin 1692 Sermo mirabilis or The silent language whereby one may learn how to impart his mind to his friend in any language being a wonderful art kept secret for several ages in Padua and now published only to the wise and prudent London Printed for Tho Salusbury and sold by Randal Taylor 1692 OCLC 27245872 Daniel Defoe 1720 The Life and Adventures of Mr Duncan Campbell Canlas Loida 2006 Laurent Clerc Apostle to the Deaf People of the New World The Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center Gallaudet University a b How Sign Language Works Stuff You Should Know 2014 02 06 Retrieved 2019 03 26 Ethnologue report for language code bfi Ethnologue com Archived from the original on 2012 10 09 Retrieved 2012 09 30 SIL Electronic Survey Reports Spanish Sign Language survey PDF Sil org Archived PDF from the original on 2012 10 20 Retrieved 2012 09 30 SIL Electronic Survey Reports Bolivia deaf community and sign language pre survey report PDF Sil org Archived PDF from the original on 2012 09 15 Retrieved 2012 09 30 Lucas Ceil Robert Bayley and Clayton Valli 2001 Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language Washington DC Gallaudet University Press Lucas Ceil Bayley Robert Clayton Valli 2003 What s Your Sign for PIZZA An Introduction to Variation in American Sign Language Washington DC Gallaudet University Press Cf Supalla Ted amp Rebecca Webb 1995 The grammar of international sign A new look at pidgin languages In Emmorey Karen amp Judy Reilly eds Language gesture and space International Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research Hillsdale N J Erlbaum pp 333 352 a b McKee Rachel Napier Jemina 2002 Interpreting into International Sign Pidgin Sign Language amp Linguistics 5 1 27 54 doi 10 1075 sll 5 1 04mck Rubino F Hayhurst A and Guejlman J 1975 Gestuno International sign language of the deaf Carlisle British Deaf Association Bar Tzur David 2002 International gesture Principles and gestures websiteMoody W 1987 International gesture In J V Van Cleve ed Gallaudet encyclopedia of deaf people and deafness Vol 3 S Z Index New York McGraw Hill Book Company Inc a b Klima Edward S amp Bellugi Ursula 1979 The signs of language Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press ISBN 0 674 80795 2 Baker Anne Bogaerde Beppie van den Pfau Roland Schermer G M 2016 The Linguistics of Sign Languages An Introduction John Benjamins Publishing Company p 2 ISBN 978 90 272 1230 6 Stokoe William C 1960 Sign Language Structure An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf Archived 2013 12 02 at the Wayback Machine Studies in linguistics Occasional papers No 8 Buffalo Dept of Anthropology and Linguistics University of Buffalo Bross Fabian 2020 The clausal syntax of German Sign Language A cartographic approach Berlin Language Science Press Page 37 38 Johnston Trevor A 1989 Auslan The Sign Language of the Australian Deaf community The University of Sydney unpublished Ph D dissertation a b c Taub S 2001 Language from the body New York Cambridge University Press Pinker Steven The Language Instinct Penguin Books p 36 Fabian Bross 2016 Chereme Archived 2018 03 17 at the Wayback Machine In Hall T A Pompino Marschall B ed Dictionaries of Linguistics and Communication Science Volume Phonetics and Phonology Berlin New York Mouton de Gruyter Vicars Bill American Sign Language parameters ASL University Bill Vicars Retrieved 2021 08 13 Emmorey K 2002 Language cognition and the brain Insights from sign language research Mahwah NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Janse Mark Borkent Hans Tol Sijmen eds 1990 Linguistic Bibliography for the Year 1988 Leiden Netherlands Brill pp 970 972 ISBN 978 07 92 30936 9 Pirot Khunaw Sulaiman Ali Wrya Izaddin 2021 09 29 The Common Misconceptions about Sign Language Journal of University of Raparin 8 3 110 132 doi 10 26750 Vol 8 No 3 Paper6 ISSN 2522 7130 S2CID 244246983 Perlmutter David M What is Sign Language PDF LSA Archived PDF from the original on 12 April 2014 Retrieved 4 November 2013 Nakamura Karen 1995 About American Sign Language Deaf Resource Library Yale University 1 Battison Robbin 1978 Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language Silver Spring MD Linstok Press Liddell Scott K 2003 Grammar Gesture and Meaning in American Sign Language Cambridge Cambridge University Press Josep Quer i Carbonell Carlo Cecchetto Rannveig Sverrisd Attir eds 2017 SignGram blueprint A guide to sign language grammar writing De Gruyter Mouton ISBN 9781501511806 OCLC 1012688117 Bross Fabian Hole Daniel Scope taking strategies in German Sign Language Glossa 2 1 1 30 doi 10 5334 gjgl 106 Boudreault Patrick Mayberry Rachel I 2006 Grammatical processing in American Sign Language Age of first language acquisition effects in relation to syntactic structure Language and Cognitive Processes 21 5 608 635 doi 10 1080 01690960500139363 S2CID 13572435 Baker Charlotte and Dennis Cokely 1980 American Sign Language A teacher s resource text on grammar and culture Silver Spring MD T J Publishers a b Sutton Spence Rachel and Bencie Woll 1998 The linguistics of British Sign Language Cambridge Cambridge University Press Baker Charlotte 1977 Regulators and turn taking in American Sign Language discourse in Lynn Friedman On the other hand New perspectives on American Sign Language New York Academic Press ISBN 9780122678509 a b Frishberg N 1975 Arbitrariness and Iconicity Historical Change in America Language 51 3 696 719 doi 10 2307 412894 JSTOR 412894 Klima Edward Bellugi Ursula 1989 The Signs of Language Sign Language Studies 1062 1 11 Brentari Diane Introduction Sign Languages 2011 pp 12 Brown R 1978 Why Are Signed Languages Easier to Learn than Spoken Languages Part Two Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 32 3 25 44 doi 10 2307 3823113 JSTOR 3823113 Newport Elissa Meier Richard 1985 The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition Lawrence Erlbaum Associates pp 881 938 ISBN 0898593670 For the history of research on iconicity in sign languages see for example Vermeerbergen Myriam 2006 Past and current trends in sign language research In Language amp Communication 26 2 168 192 Bross Fabian 2020 The clausal syntax of German Sign Language A cartographic approach Berlin Language Science Press Page 25 Wilcox S 2004 Conceptual spaces and embodied actions Cognitive iconicity and signed languages Cognitive Linguistics 15 2 119 47 doi 10 1515 cogl 2004 005 a b Wilcox P 2000 Metaphor in American Sign Language Washington D C Gallaudet University Press a b Meir I 2010 Iconicity and metaphor Constraints on metaphorical extension of iconic forms Language 86 4 865 96 doi 10 1353 lan 2010 0044 S2CID 117619041 Meir Irit Sandler Wendy Padden Carol Aronoff Mark 2010 Chapter 18 Emerging sign languages PDF In Marschark Marc Spencer Patricia Elizabeth eds Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies Language and Education Vol 2 New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 539003 2 OCLC 779907637 Retrieved 2016 11 05 Frishberg Nancy 1987 Ghanaian Sign Language In Cleve J Van ed Gallaudet encyclopaedia of deaf people and deafness New York McGraw Hill Book Company ISBN 9780070792296 a b c Wittmann H 1991 Classification linguistique des langues signees non vocalement Revue quebecoise de linguistique theorique et appliquee 10 1 88 See Gordon 2008 under nsr Maritime Sign Language Archived from the original on 2011 06 04 Retrieved 2011 06 01 and sfs South African Sign Language Archived from the original on 2008 09 21 Retrieved 2008 09 19 Fischer Susan D et al 2010 Variation in East Asian Sign Language Structures in Sign Languages p 499 at Google Books SIL Electronic Survey Reports The signed languages of Eastern Europe 2012 01 14 Archived from the original on 2012 01 14 Retrieved 2021 08 23 Henri Wittmann 1991 The classification is said to be typological satisfying Jakobson s condition of genetic interpretability Simons Gary F Charles D Fennig eds 2018 Bibliography of Ethnologue Data Sources Ethnologue Languages of the World 21st ed SIL International Archived from the original on 2008 07 25 Retrieved 2008 09 19 Wittmann s classification went into Ethnologue s database where it is still cited 75 The subsequent edition of Ethnologue in 1992 went up to 81 sign languages ultimately adopting Wittmann s distinction between primary and alternate sign languages going back ultimately to Stokoe 1974 and more vaguely some other traits from his analysis The 2013 version 17th edition of Ethnologue is now up to 137 sign languages a b These are Adamorobe Sign Language Armenian Sign Language Australian Aboriginal sign languages Hindu mudra the Monastic sign languages Martha s Vineyard Sign Language Plains Indian Sign Language Urubu Kaapor Sign Language Chinese Sign Language Indo Pakistani Sign Language Pakistani SL is said to be R but Indian SL to be A though they are the same language Japanese Sign Language and maybe the various Thai Hill Country sign languages French Sign Language Lyons Sign Language and Nohya Maya Sign Language Wittmann also includes bizarrely Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs a b These are Providencia Island Kod Tangan Bahasa Malaysia manually signed Malay German Ecuadoran Salvadoran Gestuno Indo Pakistani Pakistani SL is said to be R but Indian SL to be A though they are the same language Kenyan Brazilian Spanish Nepali with possible admixture Penang Rennellese Saudi the various Sri Lankan sign languages and perhaps BSL Peruvian Tijuana spurious Venezuelan and Nicaraguan sign languages Wittmann adds that this taxonomic criterion is not really applicable with any scientific rigor Auxiliary sign languages to the extent that they are full fledged natural languages and therefore included in his survey at all are mostly used by the deaf as well and some primary sign languages such as ASL and Adamorobe Sign Language have acquired auxiliary usages Wittmann includes in this class Australian Aboriginal sign languages at least 14 different languages Monastic sign language Thai Hill Country sign languages possibly including languages in Vietnam and Laos and Sri Lankan sign languages 14 deaf schools with different sign languages Wittmann s references on the subject besides his own work on creolization and relexification in spoken languages include papers such as Fischer 1974 1978 Deuchar 1987 and Judy Kegl s pre 1991 work on creolization in sign languages Wittmann s explanation for this is that models of acquisition and transmission for sign languages are not based on any typical parent child relation model of direct transmission which is inducive to variation and change to a greater extent He notes that sign creoles are much more common than vocal creoles and that we can t know on how many successive creolizations prototype A sign languages are based prior to their historicity clarification needed Brentari Diane 1998 A prosodic model of sign language phonology Cambridge Massachusetts MIT Press Brentari Diane 2002 Modality differences in sign language phonology and morphophonemics In P Meier Kearsy Cormier David Quinto Pozos eds Modality and Structure in Signed and Spoken Languages pp 35 36 doi 10 1017 CBO9780511486777 003 ISBN 9780511486777 Ulrike Zeshan Escobedo Delgado Cesar Ernesto Dikyuva Hasan Panda Sibaji de Vos Connie 2013 Cardinal numerals in rural sign languages Approaching cross modal typology Linguistic Typology 17 3 doi 10 1515 lity 2013 0019 hdl 11858 00 001M 0000 0013 B2E1 B S2CID 145616039 Emmorey Karen 2002 Language Cognition and the Brain Mahwah NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Mayberry Rachel The Critical Period for Language Acquisition and The Deaf Child s Language Comprehension A Psycholinguistic Approach PDF ACFOS Archived PDF from the original on 2017 12 01 Reilly Judy 2005 How Faces Come to Serve Grammar The Development of Nonmanual Morphology in American Sign Language In Brenda Schick Marc Marschack Patricia Elizabeth Spencer eds Advances in the Sign Language Development of Deaf Children Cary NC Oxford University Press pp 262 290 ISBN 978 0 19 803996 9 Hopkins Jason 2008 Choosing how to write sign language a sociolinguistic perspective International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2008 192 75 90 doi 10 1515 ijsl 2008 036 S2CID 145429638 Stokoe William C Dorothy C Casterline Carl G Croneberg 1965 A dictionary of American sign language on linguistic principles Washington D C Gallaudet College Press Herrero Blanco Angel L 2003 Escritura alfabetica de la Lengua de Signos Espanola once lecciones Alfaro Juan Jose Cascales Inmaculada San Vicente del Raspeig Alicante Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante ISBN 9781282574960 OCLC 643124997 Biblioteca de signos Materiales www cervantesvirtual com Archived from the original on 2020 09 06 Retrieved 2019 07 07 Traductor de espanol a LSE Apertium wiki apertium org Retrieved 2019 07 07 Diccionario normativo de la lengua de signos espanola SID sid usal es in Spanish Archived from the original on 2019 07 07 Retrieved 2019 07 07 Galea Maria 2014 SignWriting SW of Maltese Sign Language LSM and its development into an orthography Linguistic considerations Ph D dissertation Malta University of Malta Archived from the original on 13 May 2018 Retrieved 4 February 2015 Ampessan Joao Paulo The Writing of Grammatical Non Manual Expressions in Sentences in LIBRAS Using the SignWriting System Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2015 Archived from the original on 29 January 2021 Morford Jill P Staley Joshua Burns Brian Fall 2010 Videography by Jo Santiago and Brian Burns Seeing Signs Language Experience and Handshape Perception PDF Deaf Studies Digital Journal 2 Archived PDF from the original on 2012 01 11 Retrieved 2011 12 14 Kuhl P 1991 Human adults and human infants show a perceptual magnet effect for the prototypes of speech categories monkeys do not Perception and Psychophysics 50 2 93 107 doi 10 3758 bf03212211 PMID 1945741 Morford J P Grieve Smith A B MacFarlane J Staley J Waters G S 2008 Effects of language experience on the perception of American Sign Language Cognition 109 41 53 41 53 doi 10 1016 j cognition 2008 07 016 PMC 2639215 PMID 18834975 a b Woll Bencie Ladd Paddy 2003 Deaf communities in Marschark Marc Spencer Patricia Elizabeth eds Oxford handbook of deaf studies language and education Oxford UK Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 195 14997 5 McCaskill C 2011 The hidden treasure of Black ASL its history and structure Washington D C Gallaudet University Press Zeshan Ulrike de Vos Connie 2012 Sign languages in village communities Anthropological and linguistic insights Berlin and Nijmegen De Gruyter Mouton and Ishara Press Kisch Shifra 2008 Deaf discourse The social construction of deafness in a Bedouin community Medical Anthropology 27 3 283 313 doi 10 1080 01459740802222807 hdl 11245 1 345005 PMID 18663641 S2CID 1745792 Benefits of Sign Language and Other Forms of AAC for Autism 3 June 2020 Looney Dennis Lusin Natalia February 2018 Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education Summer 2016 and Fall 2016 Preliminary Report PDF Modern Language Association Archived PDF from the original on 2021 08 16 Sarah C E Batterbury 2012 Language Policy 11 253 272 ITC Guidelines on Standards for Sign Language on Digital Terrestrial Television Archived from the original on 2007 04 23 Retrieved 2008 01 30 https static1 squarespace com static 5241699de4b09847f93f8123 t 5fc407ad18e72e5fdb558e80 1606682553723 Sign language interpreting on TV and media sharing best practices pdf bare URL PDF a b Sign Language on Television RNID Archived from the original on 2009 04 17 Retrieved 2008 01 30 Bell Laboratories RECORD 1969 A collection of several articles on the AT amp T Picturephone Archived 2012 06 23 at the Wayback Machine then about to be released Bell Laboratories Pg 134 153 amp 160 187 Volume 47 No 5 May June 1969 Huang Jie Zhou Wengang Zhang Qilin Li Houqiang Li Weiping 2018 01 30 Video based Sign Language Recognition without Temporal Segmentation PDF 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI 18 Feb 2 7 2018 New Orleans Louisiana USA arXiv 1801 10111 Archived PDF from the original on 2018 03 29 Durr Patti 2020 Arnaud Balard Deaf Art National Technical Institute for the Deaf Retrieved 17 April 2022 Bickford J Albert and Melanie McKay Cody 2018 Endangerment and revitalization of sign languages pp 255 264 in The Routledge handbook of language revitalization Did you know Hawai i Sign Language is critically endangered Endangered Languages Archived from the original on 2016 03 07 Retrieved 2016 02 28 International Encyclopedia of Linguistics Oxford University Press 2003 01 01 ISBN 9780195139778 The language is considered to be endangered 9 600 deaf people in Hawaii now use American Sign Language with a few local signs for place names and cultural items McKee Rachel McKee David 2016 Assessing the vitality of NZSL 12th International Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research PDF Melbourne Australia archived PDF from the original on 2016 11 01 Bickford Albert J Lewis M Paul Simons Gary F 2014 Rating the vitality of sign languages Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 36 5 1 15 a b c d e f g h i j Velupillai Viveka 2012 An Introduction to Linguistic Typology Amsterdam Philadelphia John Benjamins Publishing pp 57 58 ISBN 9789027211989 Retrieved 16 April 2020 Sign languages in UNESCO s Atlas of the World s Languages in Danger Project University of Central Lancashire Retrieved 2021 08 23 MacDougall Jamie February 2001 Access to justice for deaf Inuit in Nunavut The role of Inuit sign language Canadian Psychology 41 1 61 doi 10 1037 h0086880 Zeshan Ulrike 2007 The ethics of documenting sign languages in village communities In Peter K Austin Oliver Bond amp David Nathan eds Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory Archived 2015 09 24 at the Wayback Machine London SOAS p 271 Taylor DiLeva Kim Once Upon A Sign Using American Sign Language To Engage Entertain And Teach All Children p 15 Libraries Unlimited 2011 eBook Collection EBSCOhost Web 29 Feb 2012 Susan Goldin Meadow Goldin Meadow 2003 Van Deusen Goldin Meadow amp Miller 2001 has done extensive work on home sign systems Adam Kendon 1988 published a seminal study of the homesign system of a deaf Enga woman from the Papua New Guinea highlands with special emphasis on iconicity The one possible exception to this is Rennellese Sign Language which has the ISO 639 3 code rsi It only ever had one deaf user and thus appears to have been a home sign system that was mistakenly accepted into the ISO 639 3 standard It has been proposed for deletion from the standard Change Request Number 2016 002 PDF ISO 639 3 SIL International Archived PDF from the original on 2016 01 28 Retrieved 2016 07 05 Premack and Premack David and Ann J 1984 The Mind of an Ape 1st ed NY W W Norton amp Co ISBN 978 0393015812 Plooij F X 1978 Some basic traits of language in wild chimpanzees in A Lock ed Action Gesture and Symbol New York Academic Press Nishida T 1968 The social group of wild chimpanzees in the Mahali Mountains Primates 9 3 167 224 doi 10 1007 bf01730971 hdl 2433 213162 S2CID 28751730 Premack D 1985 Gavagai or the future of the animal language controversy Cognition 19 3 207 296 doi 10 1016 0010 0277 85 90036 8 PMID 4017517 S2CID 39292094 Gardner R A Gardner B T 1969 Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee Science 165 3894 664 672 Bibcode 1969Sci 165 664G CiteSeerX 10 1 1 384 4164 doi 10 1126 science 165 3894 664 PMID 5793972 Gardner R A Gardner B T and Van Cantfort T E 1989 Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees Albany SUNY Press Terrace H S 1979 Nim A chimpanzee who learned Sign Language New York Knopf Savage Rumbaugh E S Rumbaugh D M McDonald K 1985 Language learning in two species of apes Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 9 4 653 665 doi 10 1016 0149 7634 85 90012 0 PMID 4080283 S2CID 579851 Patterson F G and Linden E 1981 The education of Koko New York Holt Rinehart and Winston Miles H L 1990 The cognitive foundations for reference in a signing orangutan in S T Parker and K R Gibson eds Language and intelligence in monkeys and apes Comparative Developmental Perspectives Cambridge Univ Press pp 511 539 doi 10 1017 CBO9780511665486 021 ISBN 9780511665486 Wallman Joel 1992 Aping Language Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 40666 6 Animal Communication Department of Linguistics The Ohio State University 1994 Archived from the original on 2008 02 07 Retrieved 2008 02 21 Stewart Thomas W Vaillette Nathan 2001 Language Files Materials for an Introduction to Language amp Linguistics 8th ed Columbus The Ohio State University Press pp 26 31 ISBN 978 0 8142 5076 1 Anderson Stephen R 2004 Doctor Doolittle s Delusion New Haven CT Yale University Press pp 263 300 ISBN 978 0 300 10339 7 Fromkin Victoria Rodman Robert Hyams Nina 2007 An introduction to language 8th ed Boston Thomson Wadsworth pp 352 356 ISBN 978 1 4130 1773 1 Hewes Gordon W 1973 Primate communication and the gestural origin of language Current Anthropology 14 5 32 doi 10 1086 201401 S2CID 146288708 Harnad S R Steklis H D amp Lancaster J E 1976 Origins and evolution of language and speech Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280 Kimura Doreen 1993 Neuromotor Mechanisms in Human Communication Oxford Oxford University Press Wittmann H 1980 Intonation in Glottogenesis The Melody of Language 315 Newman A J Bavelier D Corina D Jezzard P Neville HJ 2002 A Critical Period for Right Hemisphere Recruitment in American Sign Language Processing Nature Neuroscience 5 1 76 80 doi 10 1038 nn775 PMID 11753419 S2CID 2745545 Steklis H D amp Harnad S 1976 From hand to mouth Some critical stages in the evolution of language In Origins and evolution of language and speech pp 445 455 Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280 Kolb Bryan and Ian Q Whishaw 2003 Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology 5th edition Worth Publishers Blondin Masse Alexandre Harnad Stevan Picard Olivier and St Louis Bernard 2013 Symbol Grounding and the Origin of Language From Show to Tell In Lefebvre Claire Cohen Henri and Comrie Bernard eds New Perspectives on the Origins of Language BenjaminBibliography EditAronoff Mark Meir Irit Sandler Wendy 2005 The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology Language 81 2 301 44 doi 10 1353 lan 2005 0043 PMC 3250214 PMID 22223926 Branson J D Miller amp I G Marsaja 1996 Everyone here speaks sign language too a deaf village in Bali Indonesia In C Lucas ed Multicultural aspects of sociolinguistics in deaf communities Washington Gallaudet University Press pp 39 Deuchar Margaret 1987 Sign languages as creoles and Chomsky s notion of Universal Grammar Essays in honor of Noam Chomsky 81 91 New York Falmer Emmorey Karen amp Lane Harlan L Eds 2000 The signs of language revisited An anthology to honor Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima Mahwah NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates ISBN 0 8058 3246 7 Fischer Susan D 1974 Sign language and linguistic universals Actes du Colloque franco allemand de grammaire generative 2 187 204 Tubingen Niemeyer Fischer Susan D 1978 Sign languages and creoles Siple 1978 309 31 Goldin Meadow Susan 2003 The Resilience of Language What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Can Tell Us About How All Children Learn Language Psychology Press a subsidiary of Taylor amp Francis New York 2003 Gordon Raymond ed 2008 Ethnologue Languages of the World 15th edition SIL International ISBN 978 1 55671 159 6 1 55671 159 X Archived January 13 2013 at the Wayback Machine Sections for primary sign languages Browse by Language Family and alternative ones Browse by Language Family Groce Nora E 1988 Everyone here spoke sign language Hereditary deafness on Martha s Vineyard Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press ISBN 0 674 27041 X Healy Alice F 1980 Can Chimpanzees learn a phonemic language In Sebeok Thomas A amp Jean Umiker Sebeok eds Speaking of apes a critical anthology of two way communication with man New York Plenum 141 43 Kamei Nobutaka 2004 The Sign Languages of Africa Journal of African Studies Japan Association for African Studies Vol 64 March 2004 NOTE Kamei lists 23 African sign languages in this article Kegl Judy 1994 The Nicaraguan Sign Language Project An Overview Signpost 7 1 24 31 Kegl Judy Senghas A Coppola M 1999 Creation through contact Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua In M DeGraff ed Comparative Grammatical Change The Intersection of Language Acquisition Creole Genesis and Diachronic Syntax pp 179 237 Cambridge Massachusetts MIT Press Kegl Judy 2004 Language Emergence in a Language Ready Brain Acquisition Issues In Jenkins Lyle ed Biolinguistics and the Evolution of Language John Benjamins Kendon Adam 1988 Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia Cultural Semiotic and Communicative Perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press Kroeber Alfred L 1940 Stimulus diffusion American Anthropologist 42 1 20 doi 10 1525 aa 1940 42 1 02a00020 Lane Harlan L Ed 1984 The Deaf experience Classics in language and education Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press ISBN 0 674 19460 8 Lane Harlan L 1984 When the mind hears A history of the deaf New York Random House ISBN 0 394 50878 5 Madell Samantha 1998 Warlpiri Sign Language and Auslan A Comparison M A Thesis Macquarie University Sydney Australia Archived June 8 2011 at the Wayback Machine Madsen Willard J 1982 Intermediate Conversational Sign Language Gallaudet University Press ISBN 978 0 913580 79 0 O Reilly S 2005 Indigenous Sign Language and Culture the interpreting and access needs of Deaf people who are of Aboriginal and or Torres Strait Islander in Far North Queensland Sponsored by ASLIA the Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association Padden Carol amp Humphries Tom 1988 Deaf in America Voices from a culture Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press ISBN 0 674 19423 3 Pfau Roland Markus Steinbach amp Bencie Woll eds Sign language An international handbook HSK Handbooks of linguistics and communication science Berlin Mouton de Gruyter Poizner Howard Klima Edward S amp Bellugi Ursula 1987 What the hands reveal about the brain Cambridge Massachusetts MIT Press Premack David amp Ann J Premack 1983 The mind of an ape New York Norton Premack David 1985 Gavagai or the future of the animal language controversy Cognition 19 3 207 96 doi 10 1016 0010 0277 85 90036 8 PMID 4017517 S2CID 39292094 Sacks Oliver W 1989 Seeing voices A journey into the world of the deaf Berkeley University of California Press ISBN 0 520 06083 0 Sandler Wendy 2003 Sign Language Phonology In William Frawley Ed The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics 2 Sandler Wendy amp Lillo Martin Diane 2001 Natural sign languages In M Aronoff amp J Rees Miller Eds Handbook of linguistics pp 533 562 Malden MA Blackwell Publishers ISBN 0 631 20497 0 Stiles Davis Joan Kritchevsky Mark amp Bellugi Ursula Eds 1988 Spatial cognition Brain bases and development Hillsdale NJ L Erlbaum Associates ISBN 0 8058 0046 8 ISBN 0 8058 0078 6 Stokoe William C 1960 1978 Sign language structure An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf Studies in linguistics Occasional papers No 8 Dept of Anthropology and Linguistics University at Buffalo 2d ed Silver Spring Md Linstok Press Stokoe William C 1974 Classification and description of sign languages Current Trends in Linguistics 12 345 71 Twilhaar Jan Nijen and Beppie van den Bogaerde 2016 Concise Lexicon for Sign Linguistics John Benjamins Publishing Company Valli Clayton Ceil Lucas and Kristin Mulrooney 2005 Linguistics of American Sign Language An Introduction 4th Ed Washington DC Gallaudet University Press Van Deusen Phillips S B Goldin Meadow S Miller P J 2001 Enacting Stories Seeing Worlds Similarities and Differences in the Cross Cultural Narrative Development of Linguistically Isolated Deaf Children Human Development Vol 44 No 6 Wilbur R B 1987 American Sign Language Linguistic and applied dimensions San Diego CA College Hill Further reading EditFox Margalit 2007 Talking Hands What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind Simon amp Schuster ISBN 978 0 7432 4712 2 Quenqua Douglas Pushing Science s Limits in Sign Language Lexicon The New York Times December 4 2012 p D1 and published online at NYTimes com on December 3 2012 Retrieved on December 7 2012 Academic journals related to sign languages EditAmerican Annals of the Deaf Gallaudet University Press Journal of American Sign Language and Literature ASLized Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education Oxford University Press Sign Language Studies Gallaudet University Press Sign Language amp Linguistics John Benjamins Publishing CompanyExternal links EditSign language at Wikipedia s sister projects Definitions from Wiktionary Media from Commons Textbooks from Wikibooks Resources from Wikiversity Data from Wikidata Note the articles for specific sign languages e g ASL or BSL may contain further external links e g for learning those languages Langue Signes du Monde directory for all online Sign Languages dictionaries in French and English List Serv for Sign Language Linguistics The MUSSLAP Project Multimodal Human Speech and Sign Language Processing for Human Machine Communication Mallery Garrick 1879 1880 Sign Language among North American Indians by Garrick Mallery Sign language among North American Indians compared with that among other peoples and deaf mutes A first annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Project Gutenberg signlangtv org a project documenting sign language television shows for the deaf around the world Sign language at Curlie Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Sign language amp oldid 1153171391, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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