Sign what?

November 29, 2015 7:48 PM

How mutually intelligible are sign languages of the same family? And how widespread is International Sign?

Information in finding on by googling seems contradictory. Even the English and Spanish Wikipedia articles on sign languages have very different classifications for languages.

The reason I'm asking this is because I enjoy learning languages, and I think I should also learn how to sign.

I'm in Uruguay, so I should just learn Uruguayan Sign Language. Easy, right?

Well, I'm about to move to Sweden.

Learn Swedish sign language then!

Well, but I like to get my butt on a bus and spend months traveling around every chance I get.

So, being aware that learning a sign language can take a long time, I'd still would like to plan to learn more than those two, to increase the possibilities that when I meet a deaf person we will be able to have a more fluid communication.

Is International Sign useful or is it like Esperanto?

Being a native Spanish speaker I can communicate with someone from Italy if we both try. Is that possible between sign languages of the same family?

posted by Promethea to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

In general, you'll find a lot more similarity between sign languages compared to spoken languages, because many of them take advantage of the inherently visual/symbolic nature of a spatial language to convey concepts. Even where the languages don't use the same signs for a concept, you can often intuit a lot of the signs. I've gone to China before and met with Deaf students from a school there - one of the really cool things I got to do with them was comparing all of the commonalities between our respective sign languages by pointing to various objects. In my experience, international sign language isn't really that common, but this has a lot to do with the local and communal nature of signed languages.

But I'm a little puzzled by your premise - unless you are Deaf yourself, or someone who works closely with Deaf people, why do you expect to be in contact with Deaf people from different countries while travelling regularly? In general, it's pretty invisible if you're just walking down the street. The only instance where it's not invisible is if you're signing to someone else - and it's really not polite to just butt into a conversation just because you see someone signing. Actually, this happens to me a lot - I'll be signing with someone else, and then a hearing person will interrupt our conversation to practice 101 ASL they picked up from the internet, or to comment upon how "cool sign language is". For some reason, people think they're entitled to encroach on the space of Deaf people in public, so I would advise you to be really, really mindful of this given your stated intentions for learning sign language since a lot of us have really negative experiences with hearing people turning us into public novelties.

So in light of that, I would recommend that you just learn the sign language of your home place, especially since you'll find more opportunities to involve yourself in your local Deaf community (and therefore practice your language skills) than if you were to travel aboard. I feel like this would be the better way to approach it because a lot of Deaf folks worldwide consider their language culturally important to them especially due to the way they've been marginalized by hearing people, so it's important to approach your learning of the language in a culturally sensitive and respectful way especially if you are hearing. It's not the type of thing I would advise people to approach with a cavalier attitude of just casually picking up a language, because there are so many additional power dynamics involves when you're learning and engaging with the language of a marginalized minority group that strongly ties language and linguistic autonomy to culture. Learning from Deaf teachers (rather than from resources made by hearing people, or from the internet) is one way to demonstrate this goodwill, as is involving yourself in the Deaf community and learning about your local Deaf culture.
posted by Conspire at 8:28 PM on November 29, 2015 [9 favorites]

Sign languages are created, generally, by national organizations such as educational institutions or sign language institutions of a particular nation. There's no relation between whether a spoken language has overlap with another (romantic languages like Spanish and Italian) and whether the sign languages will have any overlap or mutual comprehension. For example, American Sign Language (ASL) is not mutually comprehensible with BSL (British) or ASLAN (Australian). All of the sign languages were created more or less from scratch, inasmuch as they are standardized versions of sign languages created from scratch within the deaf communities of those nations, so the spoken language familial links are not present in any way.

Without knowing any specifics for sure, I'd bet you'll find some commonalities in alphabets, and I imagine the internet has induced some cross-pollination among the sorts of people who use the internet with video: mostly young people in mostly first-world countries.
posted by Sunburnt at 8:30 PM on November 29, 2015

Although it is true that you can't tell whether two signed languages have any overlap given that they are from countries whose spoken languages are related, it is not true that "all sign languages were created more or less from scratch". ASL, for example, has its roots in an older version of LSF (the signed language of France), as do many other signed languages (e.g. those of Ireland, The Netherlands, Québec, amongst others).

If you're interested in knowing more about these languages structurally in order to make a decision on which ones to learn, please do investigate the work of Diane Brentari, who runs the Sign Language Linguistics Lab at the University of Chicago. Especially if you are interested in languages in general, I encourage you to do some research into the linguistics of signed languages and into linguistics in general. It can be much more satisfying to learn about languages along with learning how to speak them. Brentari edited a survey book which could be helpful: Sign Languages: A Cambridge Survey .

From the description:

What are the unique characteristics of sign languages that make them so fascinating? What have recent researchers discovered about them, and what do these findings tell us about human language more generally? This thematic and geographic overview examines more than forty sign languages from around the world. It begins by investigating how sign languages have survived and been transmitted for generations, and then goes on to analyse the common characteristics shared by most sign languages: for example, how the use of the visual system affects grammatical structures. The final section describes the phenomena of language variation and change. Drawing on a wide range of examples, the book explores sign languages both old and young, from British, Italian, Asian and American to Israeli, Al-Sayyid Bedouin, African and Nicaraguan. Written in a clear, readable style, it is the essential reference for students and scholars working in sign language studies and deaf studies.

posted by tractorfeed at 4:39 AM on November 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: I don't necessarily expect to meet a lot of Deaf people during my travels, but I do meet a lot of people in general, so I have more chances of meeting Deaf people (or people from any group, really). Without butting into private conversations, I can't believe people do that. About practising a language not local to me, I can probably network my way to someone willing to help me practise over Skype.

Also being a member of several marginalized groups myself, I want to be as inclusive as I can. When it comes to Deaf people, I believe learning to sign without waiting until we have a Deaf person in our closest circles is the least one can do.

And I'm militant in my causes and am active ally in others, so yeah, I meet a disproportionate amount of people who are not white-cis-straight-middleclass-ablebodied-hearing-etc.

Would you mind explaining the capitalization of "Deaf"? I have no problem following the preferred stylistic choice, I just would like to know why I'm doing it. Thank you for the advice.

Thank you for that tip, tractorfeed. I'll look into her work. I actually have been thinking into diving deeper into linguistics. The way languages relate to each other, and how they shape and are shaped by the way we think amazes me.
posted by Promethea at 5:51 AM on November 30, 2015

Sign languages are created, generally, by national organizations such as educational institutions or sign language institutions of a particular nation.

No. Sign languages are natural languages. Educational institutions' actions have resulted in a variety of dialects of sign languages (signed exact english, for instance, as a constructed/designed dialect of ASL), but sign languages are not, by and large, constructed languages.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 7:15 AM on November 30, 2015

On the capitalization of Deaf:
http://www.deafcounseling.com/whats-up-with-the-big-d-in-deaf/
posted by Conspire at 8:15 AM on November 30, 2015