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  • International Day of Sign Languages (23 September)

    From Ross Clark@21:1/5 to All on Mon Sep 23 22:46:23 2024
    A serious one for a change. Proposed by the World Federation of the
    Deaf, accepted by the United Nations in 2018.
    WFD "represents over 70 million deaf people worldwide who collectively
    use around 300 different sign languages."

    Yes, 300. There's a list here:

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

    A lot of them are highly localized, as you might expect. But they are
    not all independent local inventions. The table shows that some are historically derived from others, so that we have "families" analogous
    to spoken-language families.

    New Zealand Sign Language was made an official language of NZ by Act of Parliament in 2006. The table says that American SL "is also officially recognized as a language in Canada", but I don't know if that's the same
    thing.

    Practical importance? I don't know. Maybe no more than the International
    Day.

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  • From Aidan Kehoe@21:1/5 to All on Mon Sep 23 13:18:05 2024
    Ar an tríú lá is fiche de mí Méan Fómhair, scríobh Ross Clark:

    A serious one for a change. Proposed by the World Federation of the Deaf, accepted by the United Nations in 2018.
    WFD "represents over 70 million deaf people worldwide who collectively use around 300 different sign languages."

    Yes, 300. There's a list here:

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

    A lot of them are highly localized, as you might expect. But they are not all
    independent local inventions. The table shows that some are historically derived from others, so that we have "families" analogous to spoken-language families.

    It’s very hard to get any feel for the mutual intelligibility of these, as someone who doesn’t speak any of them. Are ASL and French sign language more like Spanish vs Italian or Spanish vs Romanian?

    I haven’t seen anyone in the group admit to any knowledge of sign language in my time here recently and twenty years ago. Has there been anyone about who could comment?

    New Zealand Sign Language was made an official language of NZ by Act of Parliament in 2006. The table says that American SL "is also officially recognized as a language in Canada", but I don't know if that's the same thing.

    Practical importance? I don't know. Maybe no more than the International Day.

    --
    ‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
    How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
    (C. Moore)

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