Sign Language














"Language is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift. Learning a new language is becoming a member of the club – the community of speakers of that language."

- Frank Smith (1928-2020), Psycholinguist

Can you imagine a world where deaf people not only have no rights – but were considered “senseless” and incapable of learning? That was 18th century Europe. French priest Charles-Michel de l’Epee (1712-1789) set a course for change.

Centuries after his death, he is still recognized as The Father of Sign Language and Deaf Education.

Changing centuries-old mindsets about the fundamental human rights of deaf people must have seemed insurmountable at the time. But Charles-Michele de l’Epee took on the challenge, systematically working to teach deaf children – and starting a revolution in the process.   

The son of a wealthy architect who worked directly for King Louis XIV, Epee could have lived a life of leisure. Instead, he studied theology and law.

While living in Paris, he met twin girls who had been deaf since birth. Epee began teaching them a form of hand signals that substituted the sounds of the alphabet. His methods became so successful that Epee took on more and more students from all walks of life, not just from wealthy families.

He wrote in his 1784 book, La Veritable Maniere d’Instruire les Sourds et Muets, Confirmee Par une Longue Experience (The True Method of Educating the deaf, Confirmed by Much Experience):

“Destitute class of persons who, though similar to ourselves are reduced, as it were, to the condition of animals…that I consider it an absolute obligation to make every effort to bring about their release from these shadows” 

Facts about Sign Language

The Development of Sign Language

His work, however, paved the way for a new perspective on Deaf people: communication WAS possible, and just because they could not hear didn’t mean they were inferior.

The Goals and Role of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD):

Sign Language Recognized in the Following Countries:

Constitution

Brazil, Finland, South Africa, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Uganda, Ecuador, Portugal, Venezuela

Legislation / Policy

Australia, Denmark, Romania, Uruguay, Belarus, France, Russian Federation, Zimbabwe, Belgium, Some German States, Slovak Republic, Brazil, Greece, Spain, Canada, Iceland, Sri Lanka, China, Iran, Colombia, Latvia, Switzerland, Cyprus, Lithuania, Thailand, Czech Republic, Mozambique, United States of America

Sign Language Officially Recognized by the Government

United Kingdom, Cuba, Mauritius

Myths

Facts

Sign Language and Education

Interesting Tidbits!

PRESERVE SIGN LANGUAGE, SAVE CULTURE!

Oralism in education

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines oralism as: "advocacy or use of the oral method of teaching the deaf". Oralism consists of various methods used in teaching the deaf how to read lips by recognizing formations of the mouth in spoken dialogue, practicing certain breathing patterns used to produce words and letters, and mimicking mouth shapes. 

Oralism methods can be traced as far back as 1648. Oralism gained popularity in America in the 1860s when it began being utilized in the education process of many schools for the deaf. The notion of oral methodology gained tread in deaf educational institutions as popular opinion believed it was paramount for the deaf community try to "assimilate" themselves into the hearing world.

Source

ISO Standard

Native Speakers in 2021

Dialects

IPSL in Bollywood

Indian Sign Language (ISL)

Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (IPSL) is the predominant sign language in the subcontinent of South Asia, used by at least 15 million deaf signers. As with many sign languages, it is difficult to estimate numbers with any certainty, as the Census of India does not list sign languages and most studies have focused on the north and urban areas. As of 2021, it is the most used sign language in the world, and Ethnologue ranks it as the 151st most "spoken" language in the world.

Some scholars regard varieties in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and possibly Nepal as dialects of Indo-Pakistani Sign Language. 

Present Status

Deaf schools in South Asia are overwhelmingly oralist in their approach. Unlike American Sign Language (ASL) and sign languages of European countries, IPSL does not have much official government support. 

With strenuous efforts by Deaf communities, NGO's, researchers and other organizations working for people with hearing disabilities since the end of the last millennium, we now have several government organizations and NGOs that offer courses and interpreter services for DHH. These are listed under NGOs in Caregivers and Resources. However, lot more of boost is needed for proper technology interventions and creation of ISL resources.

History of IPSL

Although discussion of sign languages and the lives of deaf people is extremely rare in the history of South Asian literature, there are a few references to deaf people and gestural communication in texts dating from antiquity. Symbolic hand gestures known as mudras have been employed in religious contexts in Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism for many centuries, although Buddhism have often excluded deaf people from participation in a ritual or religious membership. In addition, classical Indian dance and theatre often employs stylized hand gestures with particular meanings.

An early reference to gestures used by deaf people for communication appears in a 12th-century Islamic legal commentary, the Hidayah. In the influential text, deaf (or "dumb") people have legal standing in areas such as bequests, marriage, divorce and financial transactions, if they communicate habitually with intelligible signs.

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ISL Numerals

Fingerspelling (or dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. These manual alphabets (also known as finger alphabets or hand alphabets) have often been used in deaf education and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages. 

There are about forty manual alphabets around the world. Historically, manual alphabets have had a number of additional applications - including use as ciphers, as mnemonics and in silent religious settings. 

Grammar of IPSL

Despite the common assumption that Indo-Pakistani Sign Language is the manual representation of spoken English or Hindi, it is in fact unrelated to either language and has its own grammar. Zeshan (2014) discusses three aspects of IPSL: its lexicon, syntax and spatial grammar. Some distinct features of IPSL that differ from other sign languages include:

ISL Type Hierarchy

ASL sign for "angry" - note the furrowed eyebrows 

A Nonmanual feature, also sometimes called nonmanual signal or sign language expression, are the features of signed languages that do not use the hands. 

Nonmanual features are grammaticized and a necessary component in many signs, in the same way that manual features are. 

Nonmanual features serve a similar function to intonation in spoken languages.

The American manual alphabet and numbers

Comparison of ASL writing systems. Sutton SignWriting, Si5s, Stokoe notation, SignFont, and its simplified derivation ASL-phabet (left to right)

American Sign Language (ASL)

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada.

ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by both manual and nonmanual features. 

Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. 

Genesis

ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in West Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has propagated widely by schools for the deaf and Deaf community organizations. Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken. Reliable estimates for American ASL users range from 250,000 to 500,000 persons, including a number of children of deaf adults.

Structure

ASL signs have a number of phonemic components, such as movement of the face, the torso, and the hands. ASL is not a form of pantomime although iconicity plays a larger role in ASL than in spoken languages. English loan words are often borrowed through fingerspelling, although ASL grammar is unrelated to that of English. ASL has verbal agreement and aspectual marking and has a productive system of forming agglutinative classifiers. Many linguists believe ASL to be a subject–verb–object (SVO) language. However, there are several alternative proposals to account for ASL word order.

Bilingualism

In 2013, the White House published a response to a petition that gained over 37,000 signatures to officially recognize American Sign Language as a community language and a language of instruction in schools. The response is titled "there shouldn't be any stigma about American Sign Language" and addressed that ASL is a vital language for the Deaf and hard of hearing. 

Scholars such as Beth S. Benedict advocate not only for bilingualism (using ASL and English training) but also for early childhood intervention for children who are deaf. York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok has also campaigned for bilingualism, arguing that those who are bilingual acquire cognitive skills that may help to prevent dementia later in life.

Grammar

The grammar of ASL is the best studied of any sign language, though research is still in its infancy, dating back only to William Stokoe in the 1960s.

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French Sign Language (LSF)

LSF is the sign language of the deaf in France and French-speaking parts of Switzerland. According to Ethnologue, LSF has 100,000 native signers.

French Sign Language is frequently, though mistakenly, attributed to the work of Charles Michel de l'Épée. In fact, he is said to have discovered the already existing language by total accident; having ducked into a nearby house to escape the rain, he fell upon a pair of deaf twin sisters and was struck by the richness and complexity of the language that they used to communicate among themselves and the deaf Parisian community. The abbé accidentally came across a pair of deaf twin sisters and learnt the Old French Sign Language, and eventually he developed his "methodical signs" through public demonstrations (1771–1774). 

British Sign Language (BSL)

BSL is a sign language used in the United Kingdom (UK), and is the first or preferred language among the Deaf community in the UK. Based on the percentage of people who reported 'using British Sign Language at home' on the 2011 Scottish Census, the British Deaf Association estimates there are 151,000 BSL users in the UK, of which 87,000 are Deaf. People who are not deaf may also use BSL, as hearing relatives of deaf people, sign language interpreters or as a result of other contact with the British Deaf community. The language makes use of space and involves movement of the hands, body, face, and head. 

Plains Indian Sign Language

PISL, also known as Hand Talk, Plains Sign Talk, and First Nation Sign Language, is a trade language, formerly trade pidgin, that was once the lingua franca across what is now central Canada, the central and western United States and northern Mexico, used among the various Plains Nations. It was also used for story-telling, oratory, various ceremonies, and by deaf people for ordinary daily use. It is thought by some to be a manually coded language; however, there is not substantive evidence establishing a connection between any spoken language and Plains Sign Talk.

The name 'Plains Sign Talk' is preferred in Canada, with 'Indian' being considered pejorative by many who are Indigenous. Hence, publications and reports on the language vary in naming conventions according to origin.

As a result of the massive depopulation and the Americanization of Indigenous North Americans, the number of Plains Sign Talk speakers declined from European arrival onward. By the 1960s, there remained a "very small percentage of this number". There are few Plains Sign Talk speakers in the 21st century.

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In 1880, Colonel Garrick Mallery published a glossary of handshapes in PISL (1st Annual report of Bureau of Ethnology)

Mallery's original handshape glossary (a-l)

Mallery's original handshape glossary (m-z)

The sign "INTERNATIONAL SIGN" written in Sutton SignWriting, a kind of movement notation invented by Valerie Sutton 

International Sign Definition

International Sign (IS) is a pidgin sign language which is used in a variety of different contexts, particularly at international meetings such as the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) congress, in some European Union settings, and at some UN conferences, at events such as the Deaflympics, the Miss & Mister Deaf World, and Eurovision,[7] and informally when travelling and socializing.

As IS is a pidgin form of sign language, which is not as conventionalized or complex as natural sign languages and has a limited lexicon. Linguists do not agree on what the term International Sign means precisely, and empirically derived dictionaries are lacking. While the more commonly used term is International Sign, it is sometimes referred to as Gestuno, or International Sign Pidgin and International Gesture.  International Sign is a term used by the World Federation of the Deaf and other international organizations.

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We frequently are asked for information about International Sign - what it is, how one can learn it, and what does the accreditation system mean.  If you would like to learn more please enjoy watching this interview with Juan Carlos Druetta, one of the first Deaf interpreters to achieve the WFD-WASLI International Sign Accreditation.  Juan was also one of WASLI's previous Vice President's, and we value his contributions.  Thanks to Jose Ednilson, our current Vice President for conducting this interview with Juan while we were at the conference in Brazil last week. 

The triannual conference series Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR) is targeted specifically at the linguistic study of signed languages. Its organisation is supported by SLLS.

Sign Language Linguistic Society (SLLS)

The Sign Language Linguistics Society (SLLS) has as its main aim the promotion of sign language research on an international scale and the maintenance of high scientific and ethical standards of such research. It will act as a resource to researchers and provide support to researchers in countries where such research is just beginning. The society will encourage exchange of information through meetings and publications.

Activities

Affiliations


Communication with Deafblind People

There are various ways to communicate with a person with the dual disability of deaf-blindness. Communication methods vary from person to person depending on how they choose to communicate.

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Israeli Sign Language

Sign language is a visual way of communicating where someone uses hand gestures and movements, body language and facial expressions to communicate. Deaf people with visual impairments of varying degrees have difficulty seeing the signs, from which several adaptations have developed:

Visual Sign Language: When someone is signing to a deaf person with tunnel vision, they sign within their remaining field of vision and keep a distance.

Tracking: Tracking is a method of communication utilized by DeafBlind persons who rely on their residual vision. This approach allows consumers to access sign language within their unique visual field. With this method, the DeafBlind person will place one or both of their hands on the nterpreter’s forearm(s) or wrist(s). Doing so allows the DeafBlind person to control the speed of the

signing and keep the signs within their visual field. This method is often use with persons who are losing their vision

and transitioning to tactile sign language.

Tactile Sign Language: Tactile sign language is a method used by persons who cannot access sign language through their vision. These persons will place one or two hands on top of the signer’s hands to receive the message. The signer’s hand(s) should always be under those of the consumer. In this method,   the signer will sign at a pace allowing communication to occur comfortably..

NCIEC

Lipreading & Speech

Speaking clearly is one of the most effective ways to communicate with someone who has acquired hearing loss. Research indicates that this method can be highly effective in communicating with a deaf-blind person as they often retain some useful sight. It’s necessary to control several environmental factors to ensure the method works well. For example it’s important to check with the deafblind person which position is best for you to be in. Similarly it’s important to minimize background noise and avoid noisy places. It’s also recommended to hold a conversation in an area with good lighting. This allows your face to be seen more clearly and people with poor sight can often see better in a well lit place. In this method, it’s essential to adapt the conditions to match the individual and make sure to speak slowly and clearly. 

Tadoma

Tadoma, known also as tacticle lipreading, is a communication method for deaf-blind people where the deaf-blind person puts their hands on the speakers jaw, bottom lip or neck in order to feel the  vibrations. The three middle fingers are usually on the speaker’s cheeks while the little finger is used to pick up the vibrations in the speaker’s throat. In this way the deaf-blind person can feel both the movement of the lips as well as the vibrations in the vocal chords. It’s also useful to feel the puffing of the cheeks and warm air which is produced by nasal sounds when saying letters such as N and M. Tadoma is a difficult method to learn and is not commonly used. However some deaf-blind people can successfully use Tadoma to maintain speech skills they had before becoming deaf. 

Braille

Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper. Braille users can read computer screens and other electronic supports using refreshable braille displays. They can write braille with the original slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille notetaker or computer that prints with a braille embosser.

Braille can help deaf-blind people access information in books and magazines, although it is not intended for use in one on one conversation.  Some deaf-blind people do chose to use braille as a method to communicate with others. 

Finger Braille

This method uses the fingers as if they’re typing on a Braille typewriter. The deaf-blind individual’s fingers tap the other person’s hand just as if they were striking the locations on a Braille typewriter. This can also be done on the other individual’s knee exactly the same way.  To use this method, both individuals communicating must be familiar with Braille writing. This method is used by few deaf-blind individuals.

Print on Palm

In this method, the letters are written on the hand of the deaf-blind person so s/he can “read” what is being written on the hand. Although learning print on palm requires very little training, it isn’t as fast and is less popular than other signing methods due to the limited speed at which information can be imparted. 

Tactile fingerspelling

Tactile fingerspelling is a manual form of the alphabet in which words are spelled out where the deaf-blind person places a hand over that of the signer. Fingerspelling (or dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. 

The Lorm alphabet

At the heart of the system is a thin cotton glove or a diagram of the hand with the position of each letter or symbol marked for the convenience of the sighted person who wishes to communicate with this system. Every word is spelled out letter by letter, by touching the appropriate points on the hand. The deaf-blind person must memorize the diagram of letters in order to decode what is being said and to be able to respond or initiate a conversation. This type of tactile communication also requires knowledge of the written form of spoken language. Practically speaking, it functions as a “code” for spoken and written language.  

Tadoma is a method of communication used by deafblind individuals, in which the deafblind person places their little finger on the speaker's lips and their fingers along the jawline. The middle three fingers often fall along the speaker's cheeks with the little finger picking up the vibrations of the speaker's throat. It is sometimes referred to as tactile lipreading, as the deafblind person feels the movement of the lips, as well as vibrations of the vocal cords, puffing of the cheeks and the warm air produced by nasal sounds such as 'N' and 'M'. There are variations in the hand positioning, and it is a method sometimes used by people to support their remaining hearing.

In some cases, especially if the speaker knows sign language, the deaf-blind person may use the Tadoma method with one hand, to feel the speaker's face, and, at the same time, the deaf-blind person may use their other hand to feel the speaker sign the same words. In this way, the two methods reinforce each other, giving the deaf-blind person a better chance of understanding what the speaker is trying to communicate.

In addition, the Tadoma method can provide the deaf-blind person with a closer connection with speech than they might otherwise have had. This can, in turn, help them to retain speech skills that they developed before going deaf, and in special cases, to learn how to speak brand new words.

It is a difficult method to learn and use, and is rarely used nowadays. However, a small number of deafblind people successfully use Tadoma in everyday communication.

History

The Tadoma method was invented by American teacher Sophie Alcorn and developed at the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts. It is named after the first two children to whom it was taught: Winthrop Tad Chapman and Oma Simpson. It was hoped that the students would learn to speak by trying to reproduce what they felt on the speaker's face and throat while touching their own face.

Helen Keller used a form of Tadoma.


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Sign Language Apps