Eli5 Why are there different variants of sign language? Couldn’t one form become universal and be understood by all people regardless of language?
In: Other
Because people from different regions developed sign language individually. A person’s culture also plays into it – for example, some hand gestures that are rude in one country are not rude in another.
In general, it’s because each was developed within a single country. International cooperation it the development of it did not occur.
Same reason there are variants of spoken language.
Things like BSL (British sign language) and ASL (American Sign Language) evolved after the US had parted ways with the UK but before international telecommunications were invented, so evolved mostly separate. They each have their own, separate, hard fought, histories that I suspect many signers would be unwilling to give up.
As a note – BSL isn’t “British English in sign form”, similarly ASL isn’t American English in sign form either.
Sign languages often/always have a radically different language structure to spoken ones, including things like “spatial grammar” that doesn’t even really exist in spoken languages. In order to learn to read written English (in the case of people in English language countries) signers need to learn a completely new language – English – that is has almost nothing in common with their own.
This is the something attempts like [International Sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign) have tried to address. Unsuccessfully.
It turns out that getting all deaf people to use the same sign language is not much easier than to get everyone else one the planet to agree to speak Esperanto.
The problems with getting people to discard what is often their native language for some nebulous benefit of being able to communicate easier with some other people very far away is that people for the most part don’t want to.
Language is culture and the deaf community in many places has been very protective of theirs. (Just look into the controversy about cochlear implants to get an idea of how passionate some people are about those issues.)
It doesn’t help that sign languages aren’t related along the same line as the spoken languages that exist alongside them. American Sign Language, is for example based on French sign Language and rather different from British Sign Language.
That is the same reason we all have different languages. It’s made up really long ago, all in their own ways. And if you ask them to all used the same language it’s like asking a American to speek Japanese.
In the case Black Americans Sign Language, segregation forced African Americans to make their own language (they couldn’t attend deaf schools, which were only for the white until relatively recently). I doubt the BASL community is interested in giving up their rich heritage for an international language that might lack some of the nuance their native signing does.
I read an article decades ago that covered multiple examples of communities of hearing-impaired creating sign languages for themselves. Might have been in Smithsonian Magazine. Given the variability of gesture over phonemes in spoken language – makes sense.
Don’t deaf people deserve accents too?
Actually sign language in different cultures are very similar. Sometimes even the same for certain signs. As the deaf culture has grown over the years, the language has changed a lot because some signs/languages were more accommodating to hearing people. Or concepts that only exist to people who know sound or the spoken language.
Some sign languages like “SEE” sign, is a representation of the English language as it is spoken. SEE actually stands for Signing Exact English. And that’s not fair to those that will never know the spoken English language, so why should they have to learn it?
What’s cool is that it’s easier for a deaf American to understand a deaf Frenchman than it is a British deaf person! Sign languages have families blood spoken languages, they just aren’t at parity with them.
Latest Answers