At dinner, we were wondering why is it called “American Sign Language”? Isn’t it a universal language? I argued that other languages have terms or expressions in everyday conversation which are unique. Is this the only difference? Is it virtually universal? - Jinx
Sign language apparently has dialects – which means there’s a difference from country to country. Wiki has some guff on this.
Thanks, Ice Wolf! Very interesting…
Yup, my sister took a course in sign language and surprised me with this little bit of information. It seemed strange to deliberately have different sign languages for countries that have such similar languages. There’s even one for Northern Ireland.
Here’s the list of world wide sign languages.
So just to clarify - Canadian Sign Language is just like American Sign Language except for:
- Every phrase ends with a unique gesture for “eh”
- You have to sign everything again in French Sign Language
- There are special signs for Loonie that are different than the American Loonie Sign
This site and this article state that different sign languages are not necessarily dialects, but are sometimes mutually unintelligible. I know from second-hand experience that this is the case with Finnish and American Sign Language; an American exchange student who knew some ASL was not able to communicate with the deaf scouts at our summer camp a few years ago because they spoke in different languages.
Finnish and Swedish Sign Language, for that matter, though they belong to the same language family, are not always mutually intelligible. And Finnish and Finnish-Swedish Sign Languages have some differences as well.
Both of my friend Francesca’s parents are deaf (I don’t think she’ll mind me referring to her, since she recently started a thread about this), and British Sign Language is her first language. She says that it’s completely different from American Sign Language. I expect that deaf British and Americans have to communicate by writing.
You completely misunderstand sign languages. According to Ethnologue:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90008
there are 121 different sign languages in the world and they are mutually unintelligible (i.e., users of one can’t understand the users of others). (These are thus different languages, not different dialects.) Sign languages are not composed of obvious signs that anyone can figure out, anymore than spoken languages are composed of obvious sounds that anyone can figure out. Sign languages have to be learned, just like spoken languages. They have almost nothing to do with the spoken languages of the regions in which they are spoken. The grammar and vocabulary of the languages has virtually nothing in common with the spoken languages of the places where they are spoken.
American Sign Language, for instance, is completely different from British Sign Language. It’s not even closely related. It’s actually closer to French Sign Language, since it was partly created by users of French Sign Language. Still, it’s mutually unintelligible with French Sign Language. French Sign Language and American Sign Language are like English and German. The users of one language might occasionally be able to notice simularities in their languages, but they can’t really understand each other.
Kyla,
Or they could learn each other’s sign language.
Well, yeah, there’s that. I wonder if that’s really common?
The idea of having to learn a new language to talk to Brits or Australians sounds kind of exhausting. I bet most people don’t bother when you can just write a conversation.
It’s not like people deliberately set out to create different sign languages, any more than people in China deliberately set out to create a different language than people in Germany.
Deafness has occured all through human history, and deaf people have created sign languages to communicate with each other. If a deaf child is born into a family, even if there are no other deaf people around, the family and the child will invent signs to communicate with each other. This is known as “home sign”. And when there are several deaf people in a community their sign language will become more elaborate over time, especially if the sign language gets passed down over generations.
Modern sign languages have been developed for several hundred years from their origins as home sign systems. Back in the 1800s a group in America wanted help with deaf education, so they sent a guy to Britain to learn their methods. But they wanted to charge him. So he went to France and learned French sign language. And this is why American Sign Language is descended from French sign language, not British Sign Language.
And there are all sorts of regional sign languages in the world, all developed from home sign languages developed in those particular regions. Since almost all of these sign languages developed completely independently from each other, there’s no good reason to expect them to have anything much in common except the use of gesture instead of sound.
A column from The Master somewhat related to this: What language do deaf people dream in?
Since Sign Languages are natural languages, it’s not a matter of “deliberately having different sign languages for people with similar (spoken) languages”, any more than it’s deliberate to have different spoken languages or different methods of writing. They just evolved separatedly.
Kyla, in order to be able to write down a conversation, the skill to read and write must have been acquired already. It works with people who became deaf after learning to read and write, or with deaf people who have learned it… but not with a toddler. You need some way to sign your toddler “no”, “yes,” “good” “bad” etc etc.
I couldn’t get your link to work but I’ll point out a common exception. SEL (Signed English Language) is built to mirror English grammar and structure, including modifiers, prefixes, suffixes, verb tenses, and all of that baggage.
My wife does both SEL and ASL, but hates SEL because of the much higher burden and structure. She will fall back to “pidgin” sign in many cases if she is speaking with an SEL signer.
With all due deference to Cecil, he may be shooting pretty wide of the mark with that one. There is an enormous body of research in linguistics that suggests that his very first assertion is at best incomplete. As far back as Chomsky’s early work, there has been an idea that thought and vocalization of thought (i.e. in a spoken language) are separate steps in the same process. In “The Language Instinct”, Stephen Pinker introduces the concept by pointing out that you would hardly need to occasionally hunt for the right word to convey your meaning if you were actually thinking in the language you were speaking.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all learned a language with which we could communicate globally. Helpful with the local police, doctors and, of course, travelers.
Is there any effort or desire to merge the various sign languages?
Dude. I think you just blew my mind.
Seriously.
In Thailand, the current prime minister is an oafish thug with a nose that bears an unfortunate resemblance to a pig’s snout, so much so that political cartoonists draw it that way, and local deafs refer to him with the sign for “pig’s snout.” The PM actually threatened to make it illegal for deaf people to refer to him that way, until his advisers told him he really couldn’t do that.
GargoyleWB writes:
> I couldn’t get your link to work but I’ll point out a common exception. SEL
> (Signed English Language) is built to mirror English grammar and structure,
> including modifiers, prefixes, suffixes, verb tenses, and all of that baggage.
If you can’t get my link to work (and I’m not sure why it wouldn’t work), then Google on Ethnologue. Click on the web version and then on language families. Click on deaf sign language.
Signed English is very different from the average sign language. Signed English was not designed for the ordinary occasions when deaf speakers are conversing with each other. It was designed for occasions when they have to use something with a precise one-to-one translation into English. It’s sometimes used for communication with English speakers who haven’t learned American Sign Language (or British Sign Language or whatever). It’s not a completely different language than English (unlike American Sign Language, which has utterly different vocabulary and grammar from English). In essence, Signed English is a transcription of English into signs. It’s too slow and cumbersome for deaf people for ordinary conversations.
To Lemur866’s excellent explanation, I just wanted to add that there have been several American sign languages, including the (now assumed extinct) Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language. Although most Deaf children are now mainstreamed into neighborhood schools, those Deaf Americans who have attended schools for the deaf speak dialects of ASL that relate to the school they went to, since most learned the majority of their ASL at school.
I Know You Didn’t Mean It This Way But department: The assumption that sign language must be a universal language has its roots in old prejudices about sign language - that it is just a group of primitive gestures, like the young Helen Keller pointing to the ice cream maker and shivering to say she wanted ice cream. Home signs are often of this type, because when one person needs to communicate with a small group of people who all know the person well, there is no need to go further - and without other people to talk to in all-signed conversations, there’s no chance for it to develop further anyway. But when communities of deaf people come together, whether by chance as on Martha’s Vineyard, by design as in schools for the deaf, or by common interest, they naturally want to talk to one another. They need signs for things that are a lot harder to pantomime than a desire for ice cream. Sign languages quickly develop, with most of the signs being completely arbitrary, and those based on pantomimed home signs become so stylized they can be impossible to recognize. No surprise then that it is a rare event for two Deaf people from different countries to find signs for the same word that are coincidentally similar.
Well, of course, but I’m thinking of adults who’ve presumably been taught how to read and write already.