Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulations in combination with non-manual elements. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon.[1] Sign languages are not universal and they are not mutually intelligible with each other,[2] although there are also striking similarities among sign languages.
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Play mediaLinguists 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] 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 they 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 spoken language due to a disability or condition (augmentative and alternative communication), or those with deaf family members, such as children of deaf adults.
It is unclear how many sign languages currently exist worldwide. Each country generally has its own native sign language, and some have more than one. The 2021 edition of Ethnologue lists 150 sign languages,[4] while the SIGN-HUB Atlas of Sign Language Structures lists over 200 of them and notes that there are more which have not been documented or discovered yet.[5]
Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition.[6]
Linguists distinguish natural sign languages from other systems that are precursors to them or obtained from them, such as invented manual codes for spoken languages, home sign, "baby sign", and signs learned by non-human primates.
History
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?"[7]
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 transfer of words from a spoken language to a sign language, rather than documentation of the language itself. Pedro Ponce de León (1520–1584) is said to have developed the first manual alphabet.[8]
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.[9] 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.
In Britain, manual alphabets were also in use for a number of purposes, such as secret communication,[10] public speaking, or communication by deaf people.[11] 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.[12]
In 1680, George Dalgarno published Didascalocophus, or, The deaf and dumb mans tutor,[13] 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;[14] some have speculated that they can be traced to early Ogham manual alphabets.[15][16]
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.[17][18] 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.[19] He described such codes for both English and Latin.
By 1720, the British manual alphabet had found more or less its present form.[20] Descendants of this alphabet have been used by deaf communities (or at least in classrooms) in 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. Against the British, During Polygar war Veeran Sundaralingam a joint exercise communicated with Veerapandiya Kattabomman mute younger brother Oomaithurai by using their own sign language, first suicide bomb later two were hanged lastly in 1801.
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.[21][22] 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, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US all have English as their dominant language, but American Sign Language (ASL), used in the US and English-speaking Canada, is derived from French Sign Language[22] whereas the other three countries use varieties of British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language, which is unrelated to ASL.[23] Similarly, the sign languages of Spain and Mexico are very different, despite Spanish being the national language in each country,[24] 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.[25] Variations also arise within a 'national' sign language which don't 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.[26][27]
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.[28][29] While the more commonly used term is International Sign, it is sometimes referred to as Gestuno,[30] or International Sign Pidgin[29] and International Gesture (IG).[31] 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.[32][1][33] Such fundamental properties include duality of patterning[34] and recursion.[35] Duality of patterning means that languages are composed of smaller, meaningless units which can be combined to 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.[36] 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.[37] 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, like spoken languages, organize elementary, meaningless units called phonemes into meaningful semantic units. (These were once called cheremes, from the Greek word for "hand", in the case of sign languages, by analogy to the phonemes, from Greek for "voice", of spoken languages, but now also called phonemes, since the function is the same.) This is often called duality of patterning. As in spoken languages, these meaningless units are represented as (combinations of) features, although crude distinctions are often also made in terms of handshape (or handform), orientation, location (or place of articulation), movement, and non-manual expression.[38] 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".[39] 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.[which?]
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,[40] when it appeared with 39 entries.
Relationships with spoken languages
There is a common misconception 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.[41] 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 and 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.
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.[42]
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.