Sign language

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Two men and a woman signing
Preservation of the Sign Language, George W. Veditz (1913)

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which chiefly uses manual communication to convey meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns. This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express a speaker's thoughts. Sign languages share many similarities with spoken languages (sometimes called "oral languages", which depend primarily on sound), which is why linguists consider both to be natural languages. Although there are also some significant differences between signed and spoken languages, such as how they use space grammatically, sign languages show the same linguistic properties and use the same language faculty as do spoken languages.[1][2] They should not be confused with body language, which is a kind of non-linguistic communication.

Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages have developed, and are at the cores of local deaf cultures. Although signing is used primarily by the deaf, it is also used by others, such as people who can hear, but cannot physically speak.

It is not clear how many sign languages there are. A common misconception is that all sign languages are the same worldwide or that sign language is international. Aside from the pidgin International Sign, each country generally has its own, native sign language, and some have more than one (although there are also substantial similarities among all sign languages). The 2013 edition of Ethnologue lists 137 sign languages.[3] Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition, while others have no status at all.

Linguists distinguish natural sign languages from other systems that are precursors to them or derived from them, such as invented manual codes for spoken languages, home sign, "baby sign", and signs learned by non-human primates.


Juan Pablo Bonet, Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos ("Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak") (Madrid, 1620).


Until the 19th century, most of what we know 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.

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.[5] 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.

Chirogram from Chirologia, 1644.

In Britain, manual alphabets were also in use for a number of purposes, such as secret communication,[6] public speaking, or communication by deaf people.[7] 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.[8]

In 1680, George Dalgarno published Didascalocophus, or, The deaf and dumb mans tutor,[9] 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;[10] some have speculated that they can be traced to early Ogham manual alphabets.[11][12]

The vowels of this alphabet have survived in the contemporary 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.[13] 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.[14] He described codes for both English and Latin.



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, the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand all have English as their dominant language, but American Sign Language (ASL), used in the US and most parts of Canada, is derived from French Sign Language whereas the other three countries sign dialects of British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language.[17] Similarly, the sign languages of Spain and Mexico are very different, despite Spanish being the national language in each country,[18] and the sign language used in Bolivia is based on ASL rather than any sign language that is used in a Spanish-speaking country.[19] 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.[20][21]

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.[22]


Public service announcement in Spanish with Mexican Sign Language interpretation


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.[25] 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.[26] 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 (once called cheremes in the case of sign languages, by analogy to the phonemes of spoken languages) into meaningful semantic units. This is often called duality of patterning. As in spoken languages, these meaningless units are represented as (combinations of) features, although often also crude distinctions are made in terms of Handshape (or Handform), Orientation, Location (or Place of Articulation), Movement, and Non-manual expression. 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.

Common linguistic features of many sign languages are the occurrence of classifiers, 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".[27] 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.

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,[28] when it appeared with 39 entries.

Relationships with spoken languages[edit]

Sign language relief sculpture on a stone wall: "Life is beautiful, be happy and love each other", by Czech sculptor Zuzana Čížková on Holečkova Street in Prague-Smíchov, by a school for the deaf.

A common misconception is 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.[29] 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.



Spatial grammar and simultaneity[edit]



The large focus on the possibility of simultaneity in sign languages in contrast to spoken languages is sometimes exaggerated, though. The use of two manual articulators is subject to motor constraints, resulting in a large extent of symmetry[31] or signing with one articulator only. Further, sign languages, just like spoken languages, depend on linear sequencing of signs to form sentences; the greater use of simultaneity is mostly seen in the morphology (internal structure of individual signs).

Non-manual signs[edit]



Grammatical structure that is shown through non-manual signs includes questions, negation, relative clauses,[33] boundaries between sentences,[34] and the argument structure of some verbs.[35] ASL and BSL use similar non-manual marking for yes/no questions, for example. They are shown through raised eyebrows and a forward head tilt.[36][37]





Some researchers have suggested that the properties of ASL give it a clear advantage in terms of learning and memory.[41] Psychologist Roger Brown was one of the first to document this benefit. In his study, Brown found that when children were taught signs that had high levels of iconic mapping they were significantly more likely to recall the signs in a later memory task than when they were taught signs that had little or no iconic properties.

"Hello" in ASL (American sign language)
Another variation of "hello" in ASL (American sign language)

The pioneers of sign language linguistics were yoked with the task of trying to prove that ASL was a real language and not merely a collection of gestures or "English on the hands." One of the prevailing beliefs at this time was that 'real languages' must consist of an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning. Thus, if ASL consisted of signs that had iconic form-meaning relationship, it could not be considered a real language. As a result, iconicity as a whole was largely neglected in research of sign languages.

The cognitive linguistics perspective rejects a more traditional definition of iconicity as a relationship between linguistic form and a concrete, real-world referent. Rather it is a set of selected correspondences between the form and meaning of a sign.[42] In this view, iconicity is grounded in a language user's mental representation ("construal" in Cognitive Grammar). It is defined as a fully grammatical and central aspect of a sign language rather than a peripheral phenomenon.[43]

The cognitive linguistics perspective allows for some signs to be fully iconic or partially iconic given the number of correspondences between the possible parameters of form and meaning.[44] In this way, the Israeli Sign Language (ISL) sign for ASK has parts of its form that are iconic ("movement away from the mouth" means "something coming from the mouth"), and parts that are arbitrary (the handshape, and the orientation).[45]

Many signs have metaphoric mappings as well as iconic or metonymic ones. For these signs there are three way correspondences between a form, a concrete source and an abstract target meaning. The ASL sign LEARN has this three way correspondence. The abstract target meaning is "learning." The concrete source is putting objects into the head from books. The form is a grasping hand moving from an open palm to the forehead. The iconic correspondence is between form and concrete source. The metaphorical correspondence is between concrete source and abstract target meaning. Because the concrete source is connected to two correspondences linguistics refer to metaphorical signs as "double mapped."[42][44][45]


The classification of Sign Language families
  American Sign Language (ASL) cluster
  Vietnamese sign languages & some Thai and Lao SLs
  Japanese Sign Language family (including Taiwanese Sign Language)
  BANZSL family (British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language)
  Isolated languages
  No data
Sign language families II. Orange/pink: French (pink: ASL. light pink: mix with ASL). Blue: BANZSL. Azure: Swedish. Purple: Japanese. Green: German. Brown: Arab. Yellow: Indian. Chartreuse: Kenyan. Ochre: Uru/Paraguayan. Dark grey: Isolates. Light grey: unclassified or unknown.


Sign languages may be classified by how they arise.

In non-signing communities, home sign is not a full language, but closer to a pidgin. Home sign is amorphous and generally idiosyncratic to a particular family, where a deaf child does not have contact with other deaf children and is not educated in sign. Such systems are not generally passed on from one generation to the next. Where they are passed on, creolization would be expected to occur, resulting in a full language. However, home sign may also be closer to full language in communities where the hearing population has a gestural mode of language; examples include various Australian Aboriginal sign languages and gestural systems across West Africa, such as Mofu-Gudur in Cameroon.

A village sign language is a local indigenous language that typically arises over several generations in a relatively insular community with a high incidence of deafness, and is used both by the deaf and by a significant portion of the hearing community, who have deaf family and friends.[46] The most famous of these is probably the extinct Martha's Vineyard Sign Language of the US, but there are also numerous village languages scattered throughout Africa, Asia, and America.


Both contrast with speech-taboo languages such as the various Aboriginal Australian sign languages, which are developed by the hearing community and only used secondarily by the deaf. It is doubtful whether most of these are languages in their own right, rather than manual codes of spoken languages, though a few such as Yolngu Sign Language are independent of any particular spoken language. Hearing people may also develop sign to communicate with speakers of other languages, as in Plains Indian Sign Language; this was a contact signing system or pidgin that was evidently not used by deaf people in the Plains nations, though it presumably influenced home sign.


Young students learn some words of Lao sign language from Suliphone, a deaf artist. This was one of several activities at a school book party sponsored by Big Brother Mouse, a literacy project in Laos where Suliphone works.

The only comprehensive classification along these lines going beyond a simple listing of languages dates back to 1991.[50] The classification is based on the 69 sign languages from the 1988 edition of Ethnologue that were known at the time of the 1989 conference on sign languages in Montreal and 11 more languages the author added after the conference.[51]

Wittmann classification of sign languages
Prototype-A[52] 5 1 7 2
Prototype-R[53] 18 1 1
BSL-derived 8
DGS-derived 1 or 2
JSL-derived 2

LSF-derived 30


In his classification, the author distinguishes between primary and auxiliary sign languages[54] as well as between single languages and names that are thought to refer to more than one language.[55] The prototype-A class of languages includes all those sign languages that seemingly cannot be derived from any other language.[52] Prototype-R languages are languages that are remotely modelled on a prototype-A language (in many cases thought to have been French Sign Language) by a process Kroeber (1940) called "stimulus diffusion".[53] The families of BSL, DGS, JSL, LSF (and possibly LSG) were the products of creolization and relexification of prototype languages.[56] Creolization is seen as enriching overt morphology in sign languages, as compared to reducing overt morphology in spoken languages.[57]


Linguistic typology (going back to Edward Sapir) is based on word structure and distinguishes morphological classes such as agglutinating/concatenating, inflectional, polysynthetic, incorporating, and isolating ones.

Sign languages vary in word-order typology. For example, Austrian Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language and Indo-Pakistani Sign Language are Subject-object-verb while ASL is Subject-verb-object. Influence from the surrounding spoken languages is not improbable.


Brentari[58][59] classifies sign languages as a whole group determined by the medium of communication (visual instead of auditory) as one group with the features monosyllabic and polymorphemic. That means, that one syllable (i.e. one word, one sign) can express several morphemes, e.g., subject and object of a verb determine the direction of the verb's movement (inflection).

Another aspect of typology that has been studied in sign languages is their systems for cardinal numbers.[60] Typologically significant differences have been found between sign languages.




Written forms[edit]





Sign perception[edit]


In society[edit]

Deaf communities and deaf culture[edit]

Deaf communities are very widespread in the world, and the cultures within them are very rich. Sometimes they do not even intersect with the culture of the hearing population because of the communication difficulties caused by the impediments for hard-of-hearing people to perceive aurally conveyed information.[citation needed]

Legal recognition[edit]



A deaf person using a remote VRS interpreter to communicate with a hearing person


The Internet now allows deaf people to talk via a video link, either with a special-purpose videophone designed for use with sign language or with "off-the-shelf" video services designed for use with broadband and an ordinary computer webcam. The special videophones that are designed for sign language communication may provide better quality than 'off-the-shelf' services and may use data compression methods specifically designed to maximize the intelligibility of sign languages. Some advanced equipment enables a person to remotely control the other person's video camera, in order to zoom in and out or to point the camera better to understand the signing.


An ASL interpreter (in the Joe Greene jersey) appearing at a rally for the Pittsburgh Steelers prior to the U.S. Super Bowl XLV.


The interpretation flow is normally between a sign language and a spoken language that are customarily used in the same country, such as French Sign Language (LSF) and spoken French in France, Spanish Sign Language (LSE) to spoken Spanish and Spain, British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English in the U.K., and American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English in the USA and most of anglophone Canada (since BSL and ASL are distinct sign languages both used in English-speaking countries), etc. Sign language interpreters who can translate between signed and spoken languages that are not normally paired (such as between LSE and English), are also available, albeit less frequently.

Remote interpreting[edit]

Video interpreter sign used at VRS/VRI service locations

Interpreters may be physically present with both parties to the conversation but, since the technological advancements in the early 2000s, provision of interpreters in remote locations has become available. In video remote interpreting (VRI), the two clients (a sign language user and a hearing person who wish to communicate with each other) are in one location, and the interpreter is in another. The interpreter communicates with the sign language user via a video telecommunications link, and with the hearing person by an audio link. VRI can be used for situations in which no on-site interpreters are available.

However, VRI cannot be used for situations in which all parties are speaking via telephone alone. With video relay service (VRS), the sign language user, the interpreter, and the hearing person are in three separate locations, thus allowing the two clients to talk to each other on the phone through the interpreter.

Interpretation on television[edit]

Sign language is sometimes provided for television programmes. The signer usually appears in the bottom corner of the screen, with the programme being broadcast full size or slightly shrunk away from that corner. Typically for press conferences such as those given by the Mayor of New York City, the signer appears to stage left or right of the public official to allow both the speaker and signer to be in frame at the same time.

Paddy Ladd initiated deaf programming on British television in the 1980s and is credited with getting sign language on television and enabling deaf children to be educated in sign.[69]

In traditional analogue broadcasting, many programmes are repeated, often in the early hours of the morning, with the signer present rather than have them appear at the main broadcast time.[70] This is due to the distraction they cause to those not wishing to see the signer.[citation needed] On the BBC, many programmes that broadcast late at night or early in the morning are signed. Some emerging television technologies allow the viewer to turn the signer on and off in a similar manner to subtitles and closed captioning.[70]

Legal requirements covering sign language on television vary from country to country. In the United Kingdom, the Broadcasting Act 1996 addressed the requirements for blind and deaf viewers,[71] but has since been replaced by the Communications Act 2003.

Sign languages and language endangerment[edit]

As with any spoken language, sign languages are also vulnerable to becoming endangered. For example, a sign language used by a small community may be endangered and even abandoned as users shift to a sign language used by a larger community. One example of an endangered sign language is Hawai'i Sign Language, which is almost extinct except for a few elderly signers.[72][73] Methods are being developed to assess the language vitality of sign languages.[74]

Use of sign languages in hearing communities[edit]



A pidgin sign language arose among tribes of American Indians in the Great Plains region of North America (see Plains Indian Sign Language). It was used to communicate among tribes with different spoken languages. There are especially users today among the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Unlike other sign languages developed by hearing people, it shares the spatial grammar of deaf sign languages. In the 1500s, a Spanish expeditionary, Cabeza de Vaca, observed natives in the western part of modern-day Florida using sign language,[citation needed] and in the mid-16th century Coronado mentioned that communication with the Tonkawa using signs was possible without a translator.[citation needed] Whether or not these gesture systems reached the stage at which they could properly be called languages is still up for debate. There are estimates indicating that as many as 2% of Native Americans are seriously or completely deaf, a rate more than twice the national average.[citation needed]

Signs may also be used for manual communication in noisy or secret situations, such as hunting.

Communication systems similar to sign language[edit]

There are a number of communication systems that are similar in some respects to sign languages, while not having all the characteristics of a full sign language, particularly its grammatical structure. Many of these are either precursors to natural sign languages or are derived from them.

Manual codes for spoken languages[edit]

When Deaf and Hearing people interact, signing systems may be developed that use signs drawn from a natural sign language but used according to the grammar of the spoken language. In particular, when people devise one-for-one sign-for-word correspondences between spoken words (or even morphemes) and signs that represent them, the system that results is a manual code for a spoken language, rather than a natural sign language. Such systems may be invented in an attempt to help teach Deaf children the spoken language, and generally are not used outside an educational context.

"Baby sign language" with hearing children[edit]

Main article: Baby sign language

It has become popular for hearing parents to teach signs (from ASL or some other sign language) to young hearing children. Since the muscles in babies' hands grow and develop quicker than their mouths, signs can be a beneficial option for better communication.[75] Babies can usually produce signs before they can speak. This decreases the confusion between parents when trying to figure out what their child wants. When the child begins to speak, signing is usually abandoned, so the child does not progress to acquiring the grammar of the sign language.


Home sign[edit]

Main article: Home sign

Informal, rudimentary sign systems are sometimes developed within a single family. For instance, when hearing parents with no sign language skills have a deaf child, a system of signs may develop naturally, unless repressed by the parents. The term for these mini-languages is home sign (sometimes "homesign" or "kitchen sign").[76]


Primate use[edit]

There have been several notable examples of scientists teaching signs to non-human primates in order to communicate with humans,[78] such as common chimpanzees,[79][80][81][82][83][84][85] gorillas[86] and orangutans.[87] However, the degree to which these signs constitute knowledge of a human language (as a complete system, rather than simply signs/words) is a matter of substantial controversy and dispute.[88][89] Notable examples of animals who have learned signs include:

Gestural theory of human language origins[edit]

One theory of the evolution of human language states that it developed first as a gestural system, which later shifted to speech.[90] An important question for this gestural theory is what caused the shift to vocalization.[91]

See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b Stokoe, William C.; Dorothy C. Casterline; Carl G. Croneberg. 1965. A dictionary of American sign language on linguistic principles. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press
  3. ^ Lewis, M. Paul; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2013), "Deaf sign language", Ethnologue: Languages of the World (17th ed.), SIL International, retrieved 2013-12-03 
  4. ^ Bauman, Dirksen (2008). Open your eyes: Deaf studies talking. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-4619-8. 
  5. ^ Pablo Bonet, J. de (1620) Reduction de las letras y Arte para enseñar á ablar los Mudos. Ed. Abarca de Angulo, Madrid, ejemplar facsímil accesible en la [1], online (spanish) scan of book, held at University of Sevilla, Spain
  7. ^ John Bulwer's "Chirologia: or the natural language of the hand.", published in 1644, London, mentions that alphabets are in use by deaf people, although Bulwer presents a different system which is focused on public speaking.
  8. ^ Bulwer, J. (1648) Philocopus, or the Deaf and Dumbe Mans Friend, London: Humphrey and Moseley.
  10. ^ See Wilkins (1641) above. Wilkins was aware that the systems he describes are old, and refers to Bede's account of Roman and Greek finger alphabets.
    and Hay, A. and Lee, R. A Pictorial History of the evolution of the British Manual Alphabet (British Deaf History Society Publications: Middlesex, 2004)
  16. ^ Canlas (2006).
  17. ^ "Ethnologue report for language code: bfi". Retrieved 2012-09-30. 
  18. ^ "SIL Electronic Survey Reports: Spanish Sign Language survey" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-09-30. 
  19. ^ "SIL Electronic Survey Reports: Bolivia deaf community and sign language pre-survey report" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-09-30. 
  20. ^ Lucas, Ceil, Robert Bayley and Clayton Valli. 2001. Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
  21. ^ Lucas, Ceil, Bayley, Robert, Clayton Valli. 2003. What's Your Sign for PIZZA? An Introduction to Variation in American Sign Language. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
  25. ^ Johnston (1989).
  26. ^ Taub (2001).
  27. ^ Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  28. ^ p. 970-972. Linguistic Bibliography for the Year 1988. Leiden, Netherlands:Brill.
  29. ^ Perlmutter, David M. "What is Sign Language?" (PDF). LSA. Retrieved 4 November 2013. 
  30. ^ Nakamura (1995).
  31. ^ Battison, Robbin (1978). Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press.
  32. ^ Liddell, Scott K. (2003). Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  33. ^ Boudreault, Patrick; Mayberry, Rachel I. (2006). "Grammatical processing in American Sign Language: Age of first-language acquisition effects in relation to syntactic structure". Language and Cognitive Processes 21 (5): 608–635. doi:10.1080/01690960500139363. 
  34. ^ Fenlon, Jordan; Denmark, Tanya; Campbell, Ruth; Woll, Bencie (2008). "Seeing sentence boundaries". Sign Language & Linguistics 10 (2): 177–200. 
  35. ^ Thompson, Robin; Emmorey, Karen; Kluender, Robert (2006). "The Relationship between Eye Gaze and Verb Agreement in American Sign Language: An Eye-tracking Study". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 24 (2): 571–604. doi:10.1007/s11049-005-1829-y. 
  36. ^ Baker, Charlotte, and Dennis Cokely (1980). American Sign Language: A teacher's resource text on grammar and culture. Silver Spring, MD: T.J. Publishers.
  37. ^ a b Sutton-Spence, Rachel, and Bencie Woll (1998). The linguistics of British Sign Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  38. ^ Baker, Charlotte (1977). Regulators and turn-taking in American Sign Language discourse, in Lynn Friedman, On the other hand: New perspectives on American Sign Language. New York: Academic Press
  39. ^ Frishberg (1975)
  40. ^ Klima & Bellugi (1979)
  41. ^ Brown 1980
  42. ^ a b Taub (2001)
  43. ^ Wilcox (2004)
  44. ^ a b Wilcox (2000)
  45. ^ a b Meir (2010)
  47. ^ Frishberg (1987). See also the classification of Wittmann (1991) for the general issue of jargons as prototypes in sign language genesis.
  48. ^ See Gordon (2008), under nsr [2] and sfs [3].
  49. ^ Fischer, Susan D. et al. (2010). "Variation in East Asian Sign Language Structures" in Sign Languages, p. 499., p. 499, at Google Books
  50. ^ Henri Wittmann (1991). The classification is said to be typological satisfying Jakobson's condition of genetic interpretability.
  51. ^ Wittmann's classification went into Ethnologue's database where it is still cited.[4] The subsequent edition of Ethnologue in 1992 went up to 81 sign languages, ultimately adopting Wittmann's distinction between primary and alternate sign languages (going back ultimately to Stokoe 1974) and, more vaguely, some other traits from his analysis. The 2013 version (17th edition) of Ethnologue is now up to 137 sign languages.
  52. ^ a b These are Adamorobe Sign Language, Armenian Sign Language, Australian Aboriginal sign languages, Hindu mudra, the Monastic sign languages, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, Plains Indian Sign Language, Urubú-Kaapor Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (Pakistani SL is said to be R, but Indian SL to be A, though they are the same language), Japanese Sign Language, and maybe the various Thai Hill-Country sign languages, French Sign Language, Lyons Sign Language, and Nohya Maya Sign Language. Wittmann also includes, bizarrely, Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
  53. ^ a b These are Providencia Island, Kod Tangan Bahasa Malaysia (manually signed Malay), German, Ecuadoran, Salvadoran, Gestuno, Indo-Pakistani (Pakistani SL is said to be R, but Indian SL to be A, though they are the same language), Kenyan, Brazilian, Spanish, Nepali (with possible admixture), Penang, Rennellese, Saudi, the various Sri Lankan sign languages, and perhaps BSL, Peruvian, Tijuana (spurious), Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan sign languages.
  54. ^ Wittmann adds that this taxonomic criterion is not really applicable with any scientific rigor: Auxiliary sign languages, to the extent that they are full-fledged natural languages (and therefore included in his survey) at all, are mostly used by the deaf as well, and some primary sign languages (such as ASL and Adamorobe Sign Language) have acquired auxiliary usages.
  55. ^ Wittmann includes in this class Australian Aboriginal sign languages (at least 14 different languages), Monastic sign language, Thai Hill-Country sign languages (possibly including languages in Vietnam and Laos), and Sri Lankan sign languages (14 deaf schools with different sign languages).
  56. ^ Wittmann's references on the subject, besides his own work on creolization and relexification in spoken languages, include papers such as Fischer (1974, 1978), Deuchar (1987) and Judy Kegl's pre-1991 work on creolization in sign languages.
  58. ^ Brentari, Diane (1998): A prosodic model of sign language phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; cited in Hohenberger (2007) on p. 349
  59. ^ Brentari, Diane (2002): Modality differences in sign language phonology and morphophonemics. In: Richard P. Meier, Kearsy Cormier, and David Quinto-Pozos (eds.), 35–36; cited in Hohenberger (2007) on p. 349
  61. ^ Emmorey, Karen (2002). Language, Cognition, and the Brain. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 
  62. ^ Reilly, Judy (2005). "How Faces Come to Serve Grammar: The Development of Nonmanual Morphology in American Sign Language". In Brenda Schick; Marc Marschack; Patricia Elizabeth Spencer. Advances in the Sign Language Development of Deaf Children. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press. pp. 262–290. ISBN 978-0-19-803996-9. 
  63. ^ Hopkins, Jason. (2008). "Choosing how to write sign language: a sociolinguistic perspective". International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192:75–90.
  64. ^
  65. ^ Kuhl, P. (1991). Human adults and human infants show a ‘perceptual magnet effect’ for the prototypes of speech categories, monkeys do not. Perception and Psychophysics, 50, 93–107.
  66. ^ Morford, J. P., Grieve-Smith, A. B., MacFarlane, J., Staley, J. & Waters, G. S. Effects of language experience on the perception of American Sign Language. Cognition, 109, 41–53, 2008.
  67. ^ Sarah C. E. Batterbury. 2012. Language Policy 11:253–272.
  69. ^ Prasad, Raekha (2003-03-19). "Sound and Fury". Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 2008-01-30. 
  70. ^ a b "Sign Language on Television". RNID. Retrieved 2008-01-30. 
  71. ^ "ITC Guidelines on Standards for Sign Language on Digital Terrestrial Television". Retrieved 2008-01-30. 
  72. ^ "Did you know Hawai'i Sign Language is critically endangered?". Endangered Languages. Retrieved 2016-02-28. 
  73. ^ International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. 2003-01-01. ISBN 9780195139778. The language is considered to be endangered. 9,600 deaf people in Hawaii now use American Sign Language with a few local signs for place-names and cultural items. 
  75. ^ Taylor-DiLeva, Kim. Once Upon A Sign : Using American Sign Language To Engage, Entertain, And Teach All Children, p. 15. Libraries Unlimited, 2011. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 29 Feb. 2012.
  77. ^ The one possible exception to this is Rennellese Sign Language, which has the ISO 639-3 code [rsi]. It only ever had one deaf user, and thus appears to have been a home sign system that was mistakenly-accepted into the ISO 639-3 standard. It has been proposed for deletion from the standard. ("Change Request Number: 2016-002" (PDF). ISO 639-3. SIL International. Retrieved 2016-07-05. )
  78. ^ Premack and Premack, David and Ann J (1984). The Mind of an Ape (1st ed.). NY: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0393015815. 
  89. ^ Wallman, Joel (1992). Aping Language. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40666-8. 
  91. ^ Kolb & Whishaw (2003)


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Further reading[edit]

Academic journals related to sign languages[edit]

External links[edit]
