Deaf-community sign language
A deaf-community or urban sign language is a
deaf people who do not have a common language come together and form a community. This may be a formal situation, such as the establishment of a school for deaf students, or informal, such as migration to cities for employment and the subsequent gathering of deaf people for social purposes.[1]
An example of the first is oral education; of the latter, Bamako Sign Language, which emerged among the tea circles of the uneducated deaf in the capital of Mali. Nicaraguan SL is now a language of instruction and is recognized as the national sign language; Bamako SL is not, and is threatened by the use of American Sign Language
in schools for the deaf.
Deaf-community sign languages contrast with
Aboriginal Australian sign languages
, which are developed by the hearing community and only used secondarily by the deaf, and are not independent languages.
Deaf-community languages may develop directly from
idioglossic sign (in families with more than one deaf child), as was the case with Nicaraguan SL, or they may develop from village sign languages, as appears to have been at least partially the case with American SL, which arose in a school for the deaf where French Sign Language
was the language of instruction, but seems to have derived largely from two or three village sign languages of the students.
Languages
Once a sign language is established, especially if it is a language of education, it may spread and spawn additional languages, such as in the French Sign Language family. The following are languages thought to have been established in new deaf communities, without the direct transmission of an existing sign language. There are presumably others; with many sign languages, we have no records of how they formed.[2]
- British Sign Language (urban→school)
- German Sign Language (urban)
- Old French Sign Language (urban)
- Lyons Sign Language(urban)
- Japanese Sign Language (school?)
- Chinese Sign Language (school)
- Tibetan Sign Language (standardization of several community languages)
- Thai Sign Language (urban sign with significant input from ASL)
- Qahveh Khaneh Sign Language (urban)
- Indo-Pakistani Sign Language
- Sri Lankan sign languages(school sign, fourteen languages)
- Israeli Sign Language
- Bamako Sign Language (urban)
- Mbour Sign Language (urban)
- Hausa Sign Language (urban)
- Tanzanian sign languages (school sign, seven languages)
- American Sign Language (school sign; village sign with significant input from FSL)
- Nicaraguan Sign Language (school sign)
- Venezuelan Sign Language
- Far North Queensland Indigenous Sign Language (Cairns and points north)
Other locally developed sign languages which may have formed this way are:
- (in Africa) Zimbabwean Sign Language
- (in America) Brazilian Sign Language, Colombian Sign Language, Ecuadorian Sign Language, Jamaican Country Sign Language, Peruvian Sign Language, Chiriqui Sign Language
- (in Asia) Nepalese Sign Language, Kurdish Sign Language
- (in Europe) Swiss German Sign Language, Swedish Sign Language
See also
References
- ^ OCLC 779907637. Retrieved 2016-11-05.
- ^ See also Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Deaf Sign Language". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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^a Sign-language names reflect the region of origin. Natural sign languages are not related to the spoken language used in the same region. For example, French Sign Language originated in France, but is not related to French. Conversely, ASL and BSL both originated in English-speaking countries but are not related to each other; ASL however is related to French Sign Language.
^b Denotes the number (if known) of languages within the family. No further information is given on these languages. ^c Italics indicate extinct languages. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
