Happy New Year!

Over the holidays whilst visiting London, I was reflecting on languages, so wanted the first blog of 2011 to be about sign language.  Along with sign language and lip reading, many deaf people communicate with the manual alphabet, which uses finger positions that correspond to the letters of the alphabet to spell out words.  Believe it or not, I was a member of the sign language club in 8th grade, short-lived though it was, and learned the fingerspelling alphabet for American Sign Language (ASL) and a few basic words, and remarkably, I have not forgotten it!


Sign language for the deaf was first systematized in France during the eighteenth century by Abbot Charles-Michel l'Epee and French Sign Language (FSL) was brought to the United States in 1816 by Thomas Gallaudet, founder of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. He developed American Sign Language (ASL), a language of gestures and hand symbols that express words and concepts. It is the fourth most used language in the United States today.  British Sign Language (BSL) is utilized by over 70,000 people in the UK and in 2003 was given status as a recognized minority language leading to increased funding for the needs of people who are Deaf, and has increased  awareness of the language, which has a similar status to that of other minority languages in the UK such as Gaelic and Welsh.  The Deaf community can thank RNID for their lobbying efforts!

On the whole, deaf sign languages are independent of oral languages and follow their own paths of development. In doing this research, what I found remarkable is that British Sign Language and American Sign Language are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of Britain and America share the same oral language (well sort of!). The grammar of sign languages does not necessarily resemble that of spoken languages used in the same geographical area.  BSL manual alphabet tends to be a 2-hand method whereas ASL uses a single hand.  

I think I shall explore this topic more in a future blog, but for a bit of fun, I have pasted the ASL alphabet below--have a go!

Sources: www.british-sign.co.uk, www.squidoo.com/american-sign-language-alphabet, RNID