What do you know about sign languages?
What do you know about sign languages?
Millions of people around the world talk to each other in sign languages, but there are still many misconceptions.
If all deaf and hard of hearing people in the world lived in the same state, its population would be bigger than the one of the United States. According to the World Health Organization, there are 360 million people worldwide with disabling hearing loss. [1]
Most of them speak sign languages, that is languages which use manual communication, but also movements of the body and facial expressions. Although sign languages are as effective and complex as spoken languages, there are many common misconceptions around them.
Human need of communication
First of all, sign languages are not artificial. Just like spoken languages, they develop naturally from the human need of communication. So wherever there is a deaf community (namely, everywhere), a non-spoken language shall arise. This also means that they are not all the same worldwide: the database Ethnologue censes around 140 of them. A deaf Chinese and a deaf American speaking each in his or her native tongue will then find it as difficult to communicate as any other Chinese and American.
This doesn’t mean that the American Sign Language and the American spoken English are similar, though. In contrast with a common misconception, sign languages are in fact independent from the spoken languages of their geographical area. Thus, countries which share the same spoken language, such as the UK and the USA, can have different sign languages. Viceversa, within a country the number of sign and spoken languages can be different and their geographical diffusion can be totally unrelated. For example, there are around 20 spoken languages in South Africa, but only one non-spoken idiom with two variants.
Even among linguists, sign languages have long been considered as less “real” than spoken ones. Today, this idea is no longer supported by scholars. However, it remains a widespread misconception that this kind of languages only allow to express less complex ideas. Contrariwise to what may appear “from the outside”, sign languages share the very same linguistic properties of all other natural languages. Even if they tend to be slightly more iconic than spoken ones –which means that they may tend to model their signs so that they visually reflect reality– the signs are usually as arbitrary as words and they can be used to describe philosophical and abstract concepts as much as concrete objects. Only the way you say it changes.
