Facts about sign language

In the field of Deaf Studies, the use of an upper case ‘D’ in the word ‘Deaf’ denotes membership of a Deaf community and use of an indigenous signed language as a primary or preferred language. Use of the lower case ‘d’ in the word ‘deaf’ refers to people who have a medically determined hearing loss, but who may not consider themselves to be a member of the Deaf community, and who may not use an indigenous signed language. (see “Signed Languages in Education in Europe – a preliminary exploration”, Lorraine LEESON, Dublin. Council of Europe. 2006)

No. Children of Deaf people also often learn how to sign; the native sign language of their parents will be their first language, before any spoken languages. Additionally, parents and siblings of Deaf children learn how to sign to facilitate communication. There are also a number of people who learn sign language in their free time because they have friends or want to become interpreters, or are simply interested in the language.

No, there isn’t. There are many varieties and there can actually be more than one signed language in a country, just as for oral languages. For example, there are two sign languages in Belgium (French Belgian Sign Language and Flemish Sign Language) or in Spain (Spanish Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language). Also, there are different sign languages in countries that have the same spoken language, such as in the UK and Ireland. This is due to historical developments that are different to the ones experienced in spoken languages.

Yes, there are language families within sign languages. For example Austrian Sign Language or Dutch Sign Language are more readily understood by someone who knows German Sign Language than by someone who knows Italian Sign Language. By contrast, British Sign Language is very different to any other European sign language and only related to Australian Sign Language.

There is an international communication system often called International Sign (IS). It is regularly used at international conferences and at meetings with participants who do not share a common sign language. This auxiliary language is indeed used as a lingua franca among sign language users from different countries, also in spontaneous conversation. It cannot be compared to Esperanto, however, as IS is not a language as such. It does not have a fixed grammar or lexicon and relies heavily on gestures, which have meaning only in that specific context, and uses vocabulary from the signer’s native language. This means, signs are clarified and often more than one sign is used to describe a concept to ensure understanding.

No. They are highly developed languages with their own grammar and syntax. Just as in every language, there are sentences that are difficult to translate and certain words/signs that don’t have a literal translation in another (sign) language.

This is difficult to answer. There are no reliable statistics in each Member State. An estimate for the European Union is 750,000 Deaf sign language users. On average, Deaf sign language users make up about 0.1% of the whole population in any given country. This does not include people learning a sign language as a second language or children of Deaf parents or other family members. In Finland there are for example an estimated 5,000 SL users; in France 100,000, and in Romania 20-30,000.

The French Ministry of Education prepared an adaptation of some parts of the CEFR (French version) for French Sign language, in particular common reference levels and descriptors.