"A Brief Survey of the World's Signed Languages"

The purpose of this paper is to 1) show the distribution of signed languages throughout the world; 2) give the latest estimates of speakers for these languges if available; and 3) showcase approximately 30 basic words in American, British, and Russian Sign Languages. Words on the list will include family terms; common nouns and verbs; and question words 'What,' 'Where,' 'Who,' 'When,' 'How,' and 'Why.' I am also using this research opportunity to improve my ability in making videos and captioning them.

Introduction

Sign language existed long before spoken language, according to Stokoe (2001) and others. The spoken languages used today incorporate a great deal of "non-verbal" communication and cues. Indexing, or pointing, is one such example. A person mayl point to a destination without using speech, rather than telling a person verbally "Where you want to go is directly behind you 100 meters, in a southerly direction." All language is driven by economy - how to convey the most amount of information with the least amount of work. Like signed languages, but perhaps not to the extent used in sign, spoken languages rely somewhat on facial grammar and voice intonation to convey emotion in a message. Dorothy Miles, one of the authors of British Sign Language: A Beginner's Guide, states "Some situations call for the use of gestures in preference to speech, for example, in moments of strong emotion, during ceremonies (including religious worship) for signalling in sport and certain occupations, and for purposes of secrecy and silence" (Miles 1988). Some hearing people use their hands a lot when they talk. It's a joke in the hearing world that Italians gesture excessively while speaking. Regardless of whether a language is spoken or signed, it makes sense to incorporate gesture, indexing (by pointing), and other non-verbal indicators. But it is still beyond the understanding of a more than a few that an entire language can be entirely visual. The oppression many deaf have felt over the millenia is beginning to wane as science and psychology continue to prove the effectiveness of sign language as a psycho-social necessity in the lives of deaf people. Arguments that sign languages "aren't real languages" hopefully are joining the realm of disproven arguments such as "the earth is flat."

There are hearing people who are very familiar with signed language: the children, siblings, husbands, wives, and friends of the deaf. The lives of the deaf and the hearing have, and will continue to be entwined in human history. Simply put? The deaf and hearing worlds cannot be separated. Hearing parents have deaf children; deaf parents have hearing children; hearing women fall in love and marry deaf men; deaf and hearing cousins play in the park; the list goes on. Deaf and hearing need to communicate.

"Audism," a form of discrimination based on the ability to hear, is to blame for many of the communications problems between deaf and hearing people. Hearing people expect the deaf to use the dominant spoken language of their region. They don't meet the deaf halfway on the language road - they expect the deaf to do whatever it takes to communicate with them in spoken language. Hearing people are unaware of the continuum of Hearing , Hard-of-Hearing, and Deaf in the world, and the great deal of diversity of ,people who claim alligence the Deaf community. Some deaf people whose loss is not as profound as others use speech and hearing aids. These people might have had very good teachers to help them along. Profoundly deaf people on the other end of the scale are not able to hear at all. Like many hearing local students, whose native language is Hawaiian Creole English, success in today's world for Hawaii's Deaf community means that its people must have facility in the dominant language of their region (like Standard American English in Hawaii) so they can work, go to school, get medical help when needed, and communicate with family, friends, co-workers, and fellow citizens. But they must also have sign language - the bicultural/bilingual approach.

Signed Languages of the World

Hearing people somehow assume that sign language is universal, and are quite surprised to find out their assumptions are wrong. While there are a few signed languages that have common vocabularys and are minimally intelligible with one another, many other signed languages are completely unintelligible when compared. An unspoken responsibility of deaf and hearing signers is to educate the hearing population on sign language. The first lession is usually this: Deafness knows no one populace or community. Deaf people are born into every single human community on Earth. It is unknown exactly how many cultures there are in the world - scientists cannot agree on what constitutes "culture" - is it ethnicity, religion, commonly-held traditions, language(s) exclusively, or a combination of one or more of these? Language and culture (however defined) are closely intertwined; in fact, both are threatened if one is threatened.

How many signed languages are there in the world? As with spoken language, we can only estimate. Meier (2008) believes that there are "perhaps 200 to 300 signed languages, but there has been no thorough survey done." The Ethnologue is a reliable print and online compilation on the world's languages. It is very popular with linguists worldwide as an authority on the world's languages. In the preface to the latest edition, the estimated number of world languages in 1971 was approximately 6800 languages (Ethnologue 2005). Of these, at least 121 are signed languages.

To show the diversity of signed languages around the world, I created a table below. In the table I listed each signed language appearing in the Ethnologue as follows:

• The first column lists the language, Ethnologue 3-character ID, and the country where the language is used;
• The second column is the number of estimated speakers of that language; if a number appears without further qualifying information, the number indicates the number of language users. (Sometimes the figure in this column refers only to the estimated number of deaf persons in that locale.)
• The third column contains interesting information from the Ethnologue's language entry and the language.

The distribution of signed languages is far and wide-. The deaf worldwide are connected to a language that is natural for them- a visual language. It makes sense that a signed language used in a particular place in the world has some connection to the spoken language of that same locale, just as American Sign Language and English does (e.g., lexical items, a local alphabet or system to indicate names and places, etc). However, like American Sign Language and English, one cannot conclude that the spoken and signed language have similar syntax, ways of indexing, etc. Science is continuing to prove that signed languages are just as diverse as spoken languages. In an article published in Science in 2000, Robert Meier makes the following observation on what he perceives to be the fundamental difference between signed and spoken languages regarding "typological diversity," which includes factors such as word order, sound structures, etc.

"Although signed languages differ in their vocabularies, in word order, in the presence of auxiliary-like elements, and in other ways, they seem to be much less diverse typologically than are spoken languages. The relative uniformity of signed languages, in contrast to the typological diversity of spoken languages, may be due to the differing resources available to sign and speech, as well as to the differing perceptual and articulatory constraints imposed by the visual-gestural and oral-aural channels."

However, the study of the world's signed languages is in its infancy. There are dozens and dozens of languages in which there is no data, meaning that there are many exciting discoveries to be made. However, spoken and signed languages do share a common fate - both are disappearing fast, due to economic factors, natural disasters that displace populations, and the spread of metropolitan languages such as English, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. If languages are not identified, preserved and studied, the world will lose a great deal of knowledge on how humans live, how they view the world, and how human brains think and organize knowledge. The chance to understand the workings of language are greatly threatened if these languages disappear before they can be analyzed.

Scholarly Research on Signed Languages other than ASL

William Stokoe's ground-breaking work on American Sign Language began in the early 1960's. It was Stokoe that convinced many skeptics that a signed language (in this case, American Sign Language) was indeed a language and equivalent to spoken language in terms of complexity and flexibility. He opened the door for the scholarly study of signed languages. A brief survey of articles in CSA Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts found over 930 scholarly articles about sign languages other than ASL. For example, there are 40 articles on Spanish Sign Language, 70 on French Sign Language, 49 for Italian Sign Language, and 14 for Israeli Sign Language, along with many other articles.

In 2008, linguists Harry Van der Hulst and Rachel Channon of the University of Connecticut created a comparative sign language database. "Signtyp" is a respository of over 12,000 signs in the following sign languages: American, Dutch, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, and New Zealand. SignTyp's purpose is to show how sign languages differ visually and to draw some conclusions on why that is so (Omara-Otunno 2008). The database is scheduled to be released sometime soon.

A Sketch of Russian, British and American Sign Language vocabularies

Lastly, I wanted to example some sign language data from around the world. There are at least two very good American Sign Language dictionaries freely available over the Internet. How many other signed languages besides ASL have dictionaries on the Web? The ones I found for Russian, British, and French Sign Languages were not as comprehensive as the American ones. For comparison's sake, I selected 29 common words found in all human languages (these words are part of the "Swadesh list," a basic list of 200 core vocabulary words common to all languages used by linguists in research). I videotaped myself doing ASL examples below. I used two British Sign Language Web sites for BSL signs. For Russian Sign Language, I used a Web site on the Stanford University server (Russian sign language models were Oleg Ivanov, Irina Televki, and Aurel Televko). One of the British Sign Language sites was not true video, but rather a series of still images spliced together and displayed at a speed that resembles video. Though choppy, each sign is readable and understandable. The second BSL site I used is on the opposite end of the spectrum and uses computer simulated models to produce the signs.

Below are links to small videos signing each word. They have been tested on both PC and Macintosh and appear to work without problems. I have included a "Comments" field to compare and contrast signs. I learned a great deal from doing this exercise! :o)

BritishSignLanguage.com. (n.d.). BritishSignLanguage.com: Guide to British Sign Language. Retrieved Dec. 08, 2008, from http://www.britishsignlanguage.com

Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: The Ethnologue.

Kautz, J. (2004). Russian Sign Language Project. Retrieved Dec. 07, 2008, from http://www.stanford.edu/group/ll/data2/rsl/index27.html

Meier, R. (2000, June 16). Diminishing Diversity of Signed Languages. Science, 288(5473), p1965. Retrieved December 1, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

Miles, D. (1988). British Sign Language: A Beginner's Guide. London: BBC Books.

Omara-Otunnu, E. (2008). Advance: Linguistics experts compile database to compare international sign languages. Retrieved Nov. 23, 2008, from http://www.advance.uconn.edu/2008/081006/08100609.htm

Stokoe, William C. (2001). Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Retrieved December 1, 21008 from http://library.kcc.hawaii.edu:2316/lib/kapcclib/Doc?id=10078151&ppg=8