57 Fun Facts About Sign Language

Is signing the same all over the world?

No, there are many distinct languages: American Sign Language and British Sign Language are mutually unintelligible, with unrelated vocabularies and different manual alphabets.

How many sign languages did the 2021 edition of Ethnologue list?

The 2021 edition of Ethnologue listed 150 sign languages; the SIGN-HUB Atlas counts more than 200 and notes that many remain undocumented.

In signed languages, much of the grammar of a sentence is produced 'non-manually', meaning with what?

The face and torso carry grammar: raised eyebrows and a forward head tilt mark yes/no questions in ASL, and shifting the torso marks a change of speaker role.

What does ASL's 'carelessly' mouth gesture (slightly open, tongue relaxed) mean in BSL?

Boring or unpleasant is what that mouth gesture means in BSL, while ASL reads it as 'carelessly', a neat example of non-manual signals being language-specific rather than universal.

What is the term for spelling out a word letter by letter using a manual alphabet?

Fingerspelling uses a manual alphabet to borrow words such as names from a spoken language, and can spawn 'initialized' signs built on a word's first letter.

How many hands does the British manual alphabet use?

Two hands are used: the British manual alphabet is two-handed, shared with Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language, unlike the one-handed American alphabet.

In the British manual alphabet, how are the vowels represented?

By pointing to the fingertips of the non-dominant hand: the five vowels A, E, I, O and U are a touch to the thumb, index, middle, ring and little finger in turn.

What Latin-titled 1698 pamphlet contains the earliest printed ancestor of the BSL alphabet?

Digiti Lingua, a 1698 pamphlet by an anonymous author who could not speak, printed the earliest pictures of that alphabet and suggested it could also serve for secrecy or entertainment.

Who published the first modern treatise on sign-language phonetics in Madrid in 1620?

Juan Pablo Bonet published his 'Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos' in Madrid in 1620, regarded as the first modern treatise on sign-language phonetics, with a one-handed manual alphabet.

Which Spanish Benedictine monk is credited with the first manual alphabet for teaching deaf pupils?

Pedro Ponce de León, a 16th-century Benedictine at the monastery of Oña, taught deaf children of noble families and is credited with the first manual alphabet, adapted from signs used by silent religious orders.

Which priest, the 'Father of the Deaf', founded Paris's first public deaf school in 1760?

Charles-Michel de l'Épée opened his free school for deaf pupils in Paris in 1760 after meeting two deaf sisters signing to each other, and taught through 'methodical signs' rather than speech.

What title did the National Assembly give the late founder of Paris's deaf school in 1791?

Benefactor of Humanity was the title the National Assembly voted him in July 1791, declaring too that deaf people had rights under the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Modern ASL is most closely related to the signing of which country?

Roughly 58% of ASL signs are cognate with Old French Sign Language, brought over by Laurent Clerc.

Roughly what share of modern ASL signs are cognates of Old French Sign Language signs?

About 58% of ASL signs were found to be cognate with Old French Sign Language signs in James Woodward's 1978 study, leaving ASL a distinct language rather than a dialect of LSF.

Reliable estimates put the number of ASL users in the United States in what range?

250,000 to 500,000 is the usual estimate for ASL users in the United States; no accurate census has been taken, and the figure includes hearing children of deaf adults.

Why is ASL so different from British Sign Language despite the shared spoken language?

Britain's Braidwood school refused to teach Gallaudet without payment, so in 1815 Thomas Gallaudet turned to Paris, learned the French method and brought Laurent Clerc back to open the Hartford school in 1817.

In which city did Thomas Braidwood found Britain's first school for deaf children in 1760?

Thomas Braidwood opened his Academy for the Deaf and Dumb in Edinburgh in 1760, the first school of its kind in Britain; he moved it to Hackney, London, in 1783.

In what year did the UK government formally recognise BSL as a language in its own right?

On 18 March 2003 the UK government formally recognised BSL as a language in its own right, a recognition that carried no legal protection at the time.

What did the British Sign Language Act 2022 do?

Legally recognised BSL in England, Wales and Scotland: the British Sign Language Act 2022, a private member's bill from Rosie Cooper MP, received royal assent on 28 April 2022.

According to the British Deaf Association, roughly how many people in the UK use BSL?

151,000 people in the UK use BSL, of whom about 87,000 are deaf; the figure excludes professional users such as interpreters unless they also sign at home.

Auslan belongs to which sign-language family?

BANZSL (British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language) groups three signing varieties that descend from 19th-century BSL and share one manual alphabet.

Which signed language descends from LSF and is closer to ASL than to BSL?

Irish (ISL) descends from French Sign Language, brought to Dublin's Catholic deaf schools in the 1840s by nuns trained in Caen; Irish nuns later carried it to Catholic deaf schools in Australia.

What does it mean that Auslan is a 'zero-copula' language?

The verb 'to be' is not used: Auslan links subject and predicate directly, so a sentence such as 'she is a teacher' is signed without any equivalent of 'is'.

What was International Sign formerly called?

Gestuno was the name adopted in the 1970s for the World Federation of the Deaf's standardised vocabulary; it loosely combines 'gesture' and 'oneness', and was later renamed International Sign.

In which year was the World Federation of the Deaf founded?

The World Federation of the Deaf was founded in Rome in September 1951, at the first World Congress of the Deaf; its congresses have been held roughly every four years since.

NZ Sign Language became New Zealand's third official language in 2006, alongside English and what?

Māori has been an official language since 1987; the New Zealand Sign Language Act, passed on 6 April 2006, made NZSL the third, alongside Māori and the de facto official English.

Which country wrote sign-language rights into its constitution in August 1995?

Finland guaranteed the rights of sign-language users in its fundamental-rights reform that took effect on 1 August 1995; the clause survives as Section 17 of the 2000 Constitution.

Papua New Guinean Sign Language became that country's fourth official language in what year?

In May 2015 Papua New Guinea made its sign language the country's fourth official language, alongside English, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu.

Greek Sign Language gained equal status with Modern Greek in which year?

Law 4488 of 2017 recognised Greek Sign Language as equal to Modern Greek, building on its 2000 recognition as the official language of deaf education.

Iceland's 2011 law gave Icelandic Sign Language what status?

Mother tongue of those who rely on it, and their children: Iceland's 2011 language-status act gave it that standing, with a right to learn it from the moment deafness is diagnosed.

Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged spontaneously among deaf children at schools in which city, from 1977?

Managua is right: a special-education centre opened in the city's San Judas district in 1977, growing from 50 to 100 deaf pupils by 1979, and the children built a language from their home signs.

Which MIT linguist did Nicaragua's Ministry of Education contact in 1986 to study the children's signing?

Judy Kegl, an American Sign Language linguist then at MIT, was the researcher the ministry called in 1986; her fieldwork documented the children's signing developing into a full grammar.

At its 1854 peak, roughly what proportion of Martha's Vineyard residents were deaf?

One in 155 islanders was deaf at the 1854 peak, against a national rate of about one in 5,700; the hereditary deafness traced back to settlers from the Weald of Kent.

In which Martha's Vineyard town was deafness most concentrated, at about one in 25 people?

Chilmark had about one deaf resident in 25; in its Squibnocket section as many as a quarter of some 60 residents were deaf, and hearing islanders signed too.

Who was the first deaf person known to settle on Martha's Vineyard, arriving in 1694?

Jonathan Lambert, a carpenter and farmer, arrived with his hearing wife in 1694; intermarriage among the island's close-knit settlers kept the hereditary deafness going for some 200 years.

Plains Indian Sign Language historically served the Great Plains nations mainly as what?

A lingua franca for trade and diplomacy: Plains sign talk bridged dozens of spoken languages, and an 1885 estimate counted over 110,000 'sign-talking Indians' among the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa and Arapaho.

Whose narrative of the 1527 Narváez expedition is among the earliest records of Plains sign talk?

Cabeza de Vaca, a survivor of the 1527 Narváez expedition, described Indigenous sign communication on the Texas Gulf Coast in his 1542 Relación; Coronado noted Plains sign talk again in 1541.

What term describes signing that arises over generations in an insular community with many deaf people?

Village sign language is the term; examples include Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language in Israel's Negev and Adamorobe Sign Language in Ghana, both born in communities with high hereditary deafness.

Which of these sign languages is a known linguistic isolate?

Kata Kolok, the village sign language of Bengkala in north Bali, has no known relationship to any other sign language, unlike the three other options, which belong to larger families.

Which sign-language writing system, developed by Valerie Sutton in 1974, records facial expression and movement?

SignWriting, devised by Valerie Sutton in 1974 from her dance notation, records handshapes, movement and facial expression, unlike Stokoe notation, which has no symbols for non-manual features.

What term did William Stokoe coin as the sign-language equivalent of phonology?

Cherology, from Greek cheir ('hand'), was Stokoe's term in his 1960 Sign Language Structure for analysing signs into contrastive units, the cheremes, parallel to phonology's phonemes.

What subject was William Stokoe's PhD in before he revolutionised the study of ASL?

English, specialising in medieval literature, was the field of Stokoe's Cornell PhD; he joined Gallaudet in 1955 as English department chair, recruited by a Cornell classmate who had become its dean, and only then began analysing signs.

Gallaudet University is officially bilingual in which two languages?

ASL and written English are Gallaudet's two official languages of instruction; the Washington, D.C. university, chartered in 1864, designs all its programmes for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.

Which US president signed the 1864 act allowing Gallaudet to grant college degrees?

Abraham Lincoln signed the act on 8 April 1864 authorising the Columbia Institution's collegiate department, the National Deaf-Mute College, to confer degrees; it became Gallaudet College in 1894.

The 1880 Milan Conference passed a resolution doing what to sign language in deaf education?

Banning it in favour of oral teaching: the 1880 Milan congress declared the oral method superior and resolved that signs be excluded from deaf schools; the 2010 Vancouver congress formally rejected those resolutions and apologised.

Whose remark that 'Deaf people cannot function in a hearing world' helped ignite the 1988 Deaf President Now protest?

Jane Spilman, chair of Gallaudet's board, was reported to have made the remark while defending the choice of a hearing president in March 1988; within a week she resigned and I. King Jordan became the first deaf president.

What record did Marlee Matlin set in 1987 with her Best Actress win?

Youngest Best Actress winner: Marlee Matlin was 21 when she won for her screen debut in Children of a Lesser God at the March 1987 ceremony, beating Janet Gaynor's 1929 win at 22.

Nyle DiMarco graduated from Gallaudet in 2013 with a degree in what?

Mathematics: Nyle DiMarco earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Gallaudet in 2013, then won America's Next Top Model and, the following year, Dancing with the Stars.

The ASL sign for 'I love you' merges the handshapes of which three letters?

I, L and Y are merged in the ASL 'I love you' sign: the thumb, index finger and little finger extend together, combining the handshapes for those three fingerspelled letters.

What term covers sign-language constructions showing an object's motion, position or handling?

Classifiers are handshapes that stand for a class of referent and show its motion, position or handling, such as ASL's upright '3' hand for a vehicle; they are among the most iconic parts of signed languages.

One of the earliest written references to signing appears in which dialogue of Plato?

Cratylus is where Socrates asks whether, lacking voice or tongue, we would not 'try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body', an early written reference to signing.

Which famous signing ape had a male companion named Michael who also learned signs?

Koko, the western lowland gorilla taught a modified ASL from 1972, lived with the male gorilla Michael, who learned several hundred signs; linguists note the apes acquired signs, not a full language.

In which country must every cinema release offer a national sign-language video track?

Brazil requires it: the national film agency ANCINE obliges distributors to supply a Libras video track, audio description and descriptive subtitles for commercial releases, typically delivered on a second screen or app.

What basic word order does ASL use, unlike Japanese Sign Language?

Subject-verb-object is ASL's basic order, though topic-comment structures are common; Japanese Sign Language is subject-object-verb, plausibly influenced by the word order of spoken Japanese.

George Dalgarno's 1680 alphabet for deaf pupils indicated letters by pointing to what?

Joints of the fingers and palm of the left hand were the letter positions in George Dalgarno's 1680 Didascalocophus, a scheme later echoed by the vowel positions of the British manual alphabet.

In a video relay service (VRS) call, the signer, interpreter and hearing person are in how many places?

Three separate places: in a video relay service call the signer, the interpreter and the hearing party are each remote from one another, whereas in video remote interpreting the two clients share a room.

Which Aboriginal Australian signing system is cited as independent of any spoken tongue?

Yolngu Sign Language, from north-east Arnhem Land, is described as an independent language rather than a signed form of speech, unlike the speech-taboo sign systems hearing people developed elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia.