A sign language (also signed language) is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses manual communication and body language to convey meaning. This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts.
Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages develop. Signing is also done by persons who can hear, but cannot physically speak. While they utilize space for grammar in a way that spoken languages do not, sign languages exhibit the same linguistic properties and use the same language faculty as do spoken languages. Hundreds of sign languages are in use around the world and are at the cores of local deaf cultures. Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition, while others have no status at all.
Read more about Sign Language: History, Linguistics of Sign
Famous quotes containing the words sign language, sign and/or language:
“The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?”
—Hugo Ball (1886–1927)
“If we define a sign as an exact reference, it must include symbol because a symbol is an exact reference too. The difference seems to be that a sign is an exact reference to something definite and a symbol an exact reference to something indefinite.”
—William York Tindall (1903–1981)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)