or are there different “languages” of sign language?
There is a wide variety of Sign Languages around the world. The Ethnologue currently lists 121 languages in the Deaf sign language family tree. Browsing each of those will indicate how much variety there really is.
Furthermore, note that American Sign Language and British Sign Language are mutually unintelligible. In general, the sign language of a community has nothing to do in vocabulary and grammar with the spoken language of a community. (The signers of a community may use finger spelling to express words from the spoken language for which there is no sign, but that’s really more like using a word from a foreign language when you don’t know one in your native language.)
And “American Sign Language” has many regional dialects.
I find it odd (and a little sloppy) that Ethnologue lists all of those languages as being in a family. I would put a hearty wager (and I’m fully aware that ASL is not English-- just fending off a potential lecture) on ASL having more in common (other than the method of articulation) with English than it does with, say, Japanese Sign Language.
My mother once learned a sign language called Makaton when she was working with the Intellectually Handicapped, and even though it was down here in the antipodes, when she went on a cruise, she met some Americans who were deaf, and she could communicate with them just fine - she must have learned the ASL version of Sign Language.
AFAIK, that’s done merely for convenience as it doesn’t seem that much research has been done to date on the Comparative Linguistics of the various Sign Languages.
What would your basis be for that?
For an example, here’re links to the British fingerspelling ABC and to the American version.
And that’s just for starters.
I have a couple of cousins-once-removed by marriage who’re deaf. We got to see a little bit of their Indonesian sign language at the time that we visited, which was really, really different from American sign language.
Wikipedia listings of pages for various sign languages, which isn’t even a comprehensive list for starters.
I remember when I saw Four Weddings and A Funeral for the first time I knew enough American fingerspelling to recognize that the British version used in the film was quite different.
Lama Pacos from what I remember ASL was developed from French sign language and probably has more in common with that than with spoken English.
Because the population of people knowing both ASL and English is probably (I hope you’ll be on board with this assumption here) significantly higher than the population knowing both ASL and Japanese Sign Language. I’m not talking about genetic similarity, I’m talking about the similarities that occur between two languages in contact.
I remember watching a movie called “In the Land of the Deaf” which is about the Deaf community in France, and between the French I understand and ASL, I understood the signing pretty well…
There were ALOT of signs I could pretty much understand, being fluent in American Sign Language… ASL came from French sign language a LONG time ago…
For example the sign for “look for” in ASL is made with a “C” handshape, because it came from the French sign for “Chercher” (Which is the French word for “look for”)
I know a little ASL since there are some Deaf people at my job. There are variations between generations. One deaf woman I know laughs about the signs one of our hearing man uses that he learned from his Deaf parents. She says they are old fashioned. There have also been “politically correct” changes. The signs for China, Japan and Africa have changed.
It is interesting to study but I don’t do it enough> I have problems following conversations between Deaf co-workers and can get a few signs when someone like Marlee Matlin is on TV.