WHAT IS SIGN LANGUAGE?

There are different sign languages all over the world, just as there are different spoken languages.

ASL and British Sign Language are different, mutually unintelligible languages.  Because the American and British Deaf communities were not in contact with each other, the two languages developed independently.  French Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, Taiwan Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, Thai Sign Language, Finnish Sign Language, Brazilian Sign Language, and many others have developed in communities of Deaf people, just as spoken languages have developed in communities of hearing people. Each displays the kinds of structural differences from the country’s spoken language that show it to be a language in its own right.

The discovery that sign languages are languages in their own right has led to the blossoming of literary culture in sign.  With a new sense of pride in their language and culture, and rooted in Deaf people’s strong story-telling tradition, a new generation of Deaf writers, playwrights, and poets has begun to explore the ways sign languages can be used to create works of art.  They have produced literary works in sign languages—stories, plays, and poetry—performed and disseminated on videotape.

What has been discovered over the past half century is that sign language is a language.

This is not just a discovery about sign language; it is a discovery about language itself.  It reveals human language to be more flexible than had been imagined, able to exist in either auditory or visual form.

It shows that the human drive for language is so strong that when deafness makes speech inaccessible, it finds another channel, creating language in sign.

Sign language has taught us that human language can use either channel speech or sign.  It is a living testament to the fact that language is what we all need to be human.

 

 

References

Padden, Carol A. and Tom Humphries, Deaf in

America, Harvard University Press, 1988.

Sacks, Oliver, Seeing Voices, University of California Press, 1989.

Paperback published by Harper/Collins. Perl mutter, David M. “The Language of the Deaf.”

New York Review of Books, March 28, 1991, pp. 65-72.

For additional references, consult the most extensive bibliography on sign language:

http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/Bibweb