Sign languages

Sign languages communicate through vision and bodily movement rather than through sound. Hands, face and body can all contribute to a signed utterance, and facial or body movements may carry grammatical information as well as expression. Linguistic research treats sign languages as complete natural languages, not as improvised gesture systems or word-for-word versions of nearby spoken languages. Their vocabularies and grammatical patterns are structured, though the details differ among languages.

Sign languages develop in particular communities and vary across regions. The United Nations, citing the World Federation of the Deaf, reports that deaf people collectively use more than 300 sign languages worldwide. American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL), for example, are distinct languages; the U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders notes that Americans who know ASL may not understand BSL. ASL is also grammatically distinct from English. There is no universal sign language used by all signers.

Languages can influence one another through contact, but this does not make them interchangeable. International Sign is used in some international meetings and informal encounters between signers from different language backgrounds. The United Nations describes it as a contact or pidgin form with a more limited lexicon than natural sign languages. National and local sign languages are closely connected with the communities that use them; deaf-led organizations describe language access as important to communication, learning and cultural identity. Sign languages are also not confined to one kind of community: some have emerged in village settings as well as in urban Deaf communities.

Access to a language from an early age is important to children’s linguistic development. The National Association of the Deaf and other Deaf-led organizations advocate early, full access to sign language and educational approaches that respect both sign languages and written or spoken languages used in the wider community. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities calls on states parties to facilitate sign-language use, promote the linguistic identity of the Deaf community, and provide appropriate communication and language environments in education.

International recognition of sign languages is linked to both accessibility and linguistic rights. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities explicitly calls for sign languages to be accepted and facilitated in official interactions and for their use to be recognized and promoted. It also calls for learning sign language and the linguistic identity of the Deaf community to be supported in education, and recognizes sign languages and Deaf culture as part of specific cultural and linguistic identity. These provisions establish standards for states that are parties to the Convention; their practical implementation depends on national laws, policies and services.