Sign language words & phrases: British and American signs

´´Sign language is for everyone.´´

(Kathy Clark, Children´s author)

´´I try to talk to everybody. If you can´t speak English, I´m going to do sign language.´´

(Helen Wilson, former chief judge of the US Court of Appeals)

One out of every thousand babies born to this world has a hearing disability. Born with a severe hearing loss, the child cannot understand speech, even with the use of a hearing aid. It may be a child you know. It may be your or your child´s best friend tomorrow.

Every community or linguistic population comprises Deaf members or deaf people who develop sign languages.

Sign language

Each spoken language has its counterpart: a sign language.  Currently, there are about a 100 sign languages in the world. Some are legally recognized and some have no status. Linguists who have studied these languages claim that sign languages have all the required linguistic components, just as any other true language. Sign languages have a complex spatial grammar that differs from the grammar of any spoken language. They are visual languages with its own grammatical rules and semantics. For example, BSL (British Sign Language) and ASL (American Sign Language) totally differ one from another. They are unintelligible, even though British and American hearing people share the same oral language.

American Sign Language

ASL, the fourth most commonly used language in the United States,is developed notably based on the remarkableMartha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL), once widely used on the island of Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, U.S. (early 18th century – 1952). Both, deaf and hearing people in the community used it; consequently, the loss of hearing or deafness never became a barrier to participation in public life. Nowadays, many public schools and universities offer courses, recognizing American Sign Language as a modern “foreign” language.

ISL (International Sign Language) is based on the one-handed systems used in Europe and America. These complex languages are rich and capable of expressing intentions, feelings and thoughts, just like any other language. Signs are often arbitrary, sometimes without a visual relationship to their referent. Signs used in these languages are not mime and they don´t depend on oral languages. Sign languages were not invented by hearing people, but by those who used gestures, hand signals, body talk and facial expressions to ´´say´´ what they meant.

What is HOLME?

HOLME comprises all the elements of a sign:

Handshape (Handform),

Orientation (Palm Orientation),

Location (Place of Articulation),

Movement, and

Expression (Facial expressions/Non-manual markers).

Fingerspelling is another important term in relation to sign languages, used in deaf communities and education. It is the representation of the letters of a writing and/or numeral system, by use of hands only. These systems are called finger alphabets (manual or hand alphabets). Manual or finger alphabets have two major forms:

One-handed system. It was first described by Spanish monks and adopted by the Abbé de l'Épée's deaf school (Paris, the 18th century). From there it spread to deaf communities around the world (in the 19th and 20th centuries). ISL (International Sign Language) is based on a one-handed system for representing the Roman alphabet, and it is used at international meetings (such as WFD – World Federation of the Deaf, or events like Deaflympics). Manual representations of non-Roman scripts (such as Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Greek, Hebrew) are partially based on the one-handed Latin alphabet.

Two-handed system. It differs from the one-handed system in that the vowels are represented by iconic signs (in former Yugoslavia and Turkey) or pointing to the fingertips (BANZSL group of sign languages: British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language).

Arabic, Ethiopian and Korean (syllabary) manual alphabets use handshapes, usually iconic representations of the characters in the writing system.

E.g. I want to drink coffee.

I in Sign Language: point to self, mid chest.

Want in Sign Language: extend both hands forward, palms up. Move both open curved hands toward the chest several times, as if drawing in the desired object.

Drink in Sign Language: hold your hand in a “C” curve, pull it up toward your mouth and tip it as if drinking from a glass.

Coffee in Sign Language : move your hands as if you were making coffee on an old coffee grinder (the left hand stays still while the right hand turns the crank).

Thank you in Sign Language: put the fingertips of your right hand in flat poition close to your mouth and then move your hand forward and a bit down in the direction of the person you are thanking and smile.

If you would like to share your experience related to sign languages, leave a  comment, please. If you liked the hub, don´t forget to rate it and share it with your friends!

Hubs on oral (spoken) languages which can be helpful in teaching sign language; these articles can help you develop a curriculum or syllabus for teaching sign language to the same age group. Whether a parent or a teacher, simply adjust the methodology to the content of your teaching:

Teaching English as a foreign language in preschool

TPR in teaching pre-school English

Storytelling with children: a teaching method

Stories for children: The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse by Vox Vocis