Source
r/deaf•
Apie

Are there big differences in the sign language from different cultures?

Sign language

I like languages. It's a beautiful reflection of how the human mind, collectively, makes sense of the world around it. I recently met someone online who is deaf, and I am learning a little bit of sign language. I discovered that the sign language I am learning is different from what I would learn from a deaf person in my home country.

Now I am wondering how much the differences are between the sign language in different cultures? Do you almost understand sign language from a different culture or is it pretty much starting from scratch when you learn a new language?

Posted Nov 4, 2019, 5:25 AM UTC

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DrBenedictHearing•

I appreciate your curiosity -- these are really Googleable questions. Maybe start with the Wikipedia article on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language

There are 300 or so known sign languages in the world. Some of them are grouped into language families. Just like French, Spanish, and Italian are all in the same language family, there are language families among sign languages.

So BSL, Auslan, and NZL (Britain, Australia, New Zealand sign languages) are all mutually intelligible.

ASL (American SL), on the other hand, is in the same language family as LSF (French SL).

There are also some sign language isolates; more (I think) than there are language isolates like Hungarian or Basque.

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However, you asked about *cultures*, not countries. Within countries, there are sometimes sign language differences between cultures. The best-studied difference that I know of for this is for BASL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_American_Sign_Language

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One thing to note is that I've read somewhere that Deaf people usually have an easier time understanding across language barriers with other Deaf people than hearing people have across language barriers with other hearing people. It's hard to say if this is due to common aspects of sign languages (many signs having their roots in some degree of pantomime -- learn, eat, tree, poop all come to mind), or if it's because many Deaf people get very frequent practice communicating with people who don't speak their language.

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SirChubblesbyDeaf•

By the way, French sign language is called LSF, I'm fairly certain FSL is from the Philippines

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DrBenedictHearing•

Shame on my Francophone house!

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ApieOP•

Thanks! I can definitely read through the wikipedias on the topic. I'm in Asia at the moment and even the alphabet is illegible. It makes communication a multi-step process.

Your last paragraph is what I was wondering about. Rather than Googling, I was hoping to hear from people who have had to do this. English and, for example, Mandarin are quite different, so I am wondering if it is perhaps easier for deaf people from China and, for example, the UK to speak. If the spoken language has a completely different structure then perhaps the sign language does as well. Both probably reflect how people think, but maybe not. If sign language works in some more fundamental level it might be easier. Signs seem more articulate than subtle sounds. You don't have to contend with tones if you are observing someone's body.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Much appreciated.

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CrookshanksmumDeaf•

Deaf people are used to communication barriers, gesturing when people don’t understand our sign language, and understanding gestures from others. So yes, it’s easier, but not seamless. There’s a lot of back and forth (did you mean this? Etc).

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ApieOP•

I see. The person I am currently talking to seems really patient. And, I am afraid, I am quite slow. I learned how to say "I think slow today" last night which did feel cool. Communication is magic, in whatever medium.

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DrBenedictHearing•

> If the spoken language has a completely different structure then perhaps the sign language does as well.

It sounds like you might not have absorbed something. A geographical region's signed and spoken languages don't correlate. British English and American English are mutually intelligible, but BSL and ASL are not mutually intelligible.

> If sign language works in some more fundamental level it might be easier.

Sign language does contain some pantomime aspects . Consider sentences like: "I'm happy to meet you," "I ate many hot dogs," and "get back in the car, back it up, and park around the side of the building."

In ASL, these are sentences that somebody might be able to figure out, especially in context. However, they're not universal; they use ASL-specific classifiers. A single raised finger represents a person. A three-hand held horizontally represents a car. An almost-thumbs-up represents a building.

However, then consider sentences like: "we're continuing the negotiations, but they want to pay us a flat fee instead of a commission on sales."

Or words like right ,wrong, tomorrow, yesterday, need, should, and want.

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ApieOP•

Thanks :) With different structures I was referring to how languages in Asia work very different from languages in Europe. If that is the case it makes sense that there is a lot of room for variation in the sign language, because the entire way that people describe the world is different in some parts of the world.

It's clear that sign language is a lot more complicated and harder than I thought. The pantomime element will help a bit but it looks like it gets complicated pretty quickly. Thanks again for your response.

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DrBenedictHearing•

No worries.

I'd caution you on your generalization about Asian and European languages.

Basque is SOV like Japanese but Japanese has a zero copula.

Russian has a zero copula like Japanese, but Russian is head-initial.

Russian is head-initial like Vietnamese, which is SVO like most Romance and Germanic languages.

Broadly speaking, Germanic and Romance languages, taken together, have a lot of similarities (head-initial, SVO, lots of cognates, similar copula usage, Latin alphabets). Slavic languages aren't too different. They're also all closely related, which I would argue is the main reason they're similar, not because Europeans think the same or something pseudoscientific like that.

If your first language was one of those, then "Asian languages" can seem to be very different from "European languages," but that doesn't make those two appropriate groups. Basque might seem more foreign to you than Vietnamese, because at least Vietnamese is SVO. Heck, Welsh is VSO.

Japanese and Chinese are massively different, even if one stole a lot of characters from the other. Korean has a bunch of cognates with Japanese, but they're very unrelated. Japanese and Hindi both happen to have postpositions and terminal copulas, but that's a complete coincidence.

So I think you're just getting that sense because the most common European languages are pretty inbred, and so it's easy for you to think of languages as working "the European way" and "the unusual way."

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TheSalmon25•

Here is a great article about BASL that covers how different it is from standard ASL. (I had no idea that oralism was much less of a thing in black schools.)

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ApieOP•

Thanks!

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ApieOP•

Thanks, that was a good read. I learned quite a bit there.

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humanCPengineer•

Very different. It's about as easy as you trying to understand people gesturing when you don't speak a common language. However there are sign language families, and they're not necessarily the same as the spoken language of the country.

There are sign language interpreters, often deaf interpreters, who can interpret between two or more sign languages in the same way as a hearing language

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ApieOP•

That's interesting that they might not be related to the spoken language of the country. Are there countries that share the same sign language? Do people sign more than one sign language? Please forgive the questions, I have had very little exposure to deaf people in my life. My grandmother had a hearing aid but I was too young to have any questions.

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StafaniaHoH•

Most sign languages probably borrow words from the spoken language and finger-spell them. However, since a visual language is a very different way to express things with it’s own grammar, this means the signed language develops independently from the spoken language in a country.

ASL and BSL are for example very different, because of the distance and that the Deaf groups in US and Great Britain historically didn’t get much chance to mingle, even though both countries use English as the spoken language.

Where I live Deaf people are usually interested in other sign languages, and especially if traveling a lot people tend to learn at least a bit of other languages. Younger people often know some ASL. Otherwise International Sign is used. Note that International Sign is not a sign language, just a collection of signs used in international settings to facilitate communication.

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ApieOP•

Thank you! Ok, sounds like international sign is a good start to get under the belt if one wanted to learn sign language and you are not particularly fixed to any specific country.

I didn't think about the fact that sign language and the spoken language in a country follow different evolution, but it seems obvious.

I guess in the same way that spoken language needs to add words as new things are invented, so sign language probably has to add new signs to communicate about the same new things.

It's just very interesting to me. I should probably start with the wikipedia articles u/DrBenedict shared.

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StafaniaHoH•

Exactly, not much difference in how languages evolve.

However, International Sign is definitely not the place to start. You need to know a sign language and have foundation in grammar and so on, and then you can learn sign from international sign as an addition. You should start with the local sign language of where you are, that is, if you meet Deaf people, which language do they use? You really need to meet people in person in order to learn. Especially as a beginner, there is so much you need to actually see and get explanations for. It’s hard to get feedback on if your movement and expression is good unless you meet other signers.

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Ghost_XSDeaf•

People who downvoted your question suck, but anyways, yes. I can think of one great example of the difference between ASL and DGS. For starters, alphabet in both sign languages are similar except for "T" letter. In DGS, both "G" and "T" are similar except for thumb up part. In Europe, if you sign "T" letter like bathroom, it's considered offensive because it's like a middle finger to them. I remember I first signed "Santa" when I came to the US, but my teacher thought I was saying "Jewish". I guess sign language in every culture is different, so I think it is the same thing for other verbal languages out there. Same thing with the internet language (i.e. Twitch culture). There will be always a difference.

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ApieOP•

Thanks for your response. It means a lot to receive a kibd message. I appreciate it. It seems like learning sign language is going to have to be a serious undertaking.

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