Eli5 Why are there different variants of sign language? Couldn’t one form become universal and be understood by all people regardless of language?
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Are you willing to drop speaking English entirely and speak only some other language, for no other reason besides “unity”?
Neither does the rest of the world.
Besides, even if we all started speaking the same language, that wouldn’t last long. Regional dialects would start to form. After a long enough time, they’ll become different languages. Just like how it happened with our current languages.
I’m not sure for other countries but British Sign Language even has regional differences.
At this point, making a universal sign language would be like demanding every country speak the same language. It’s not really plausible and would begin to diminish heritage and culture.
Because sign language predates VCRs, television, and the ability to wake up on one side of the planet and fall asleep on the other side. There was no convenient way to transmit the gestures of a visual language when sign languages were being developed, and there was little demand for a single international standard when it took weeks to cross an ocean.
By the time we had steam engines or internal combustion engines, regional sign languages were already in place. No single sign language ever became an international standard for the same reason that Esperanto never really took off.
I was told of this but in Australia the deaf use Auslan. And a woman went into the local school for the deaf and asked if they had an American exchange teacher working with them. They said yes why. Apparently a bus load of small children past her signing out the song Twinkle twinkle little vagina. LOL. Apparently the sign for vagina in Australia is the same as star in America.
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?
Why are there different spoken languages? Couldn’t one language become universal and understood by all people?
Questions like this are audist and ableist. I understand you’re not in a position to realize that and it’s not how you intended, but you should be aware that deaf people hear this all the time, and it diminishes their world and their culture. This is like the 20th time I’ve seen it either here or in askreddit, and the hearing population by and large really needs to start accepting that this is not an okay question to ask so publicly.
It’s kind of like saying “why can’t women just learn to drive better?” Would you accept the excuse of someone asking that and saying, “well I don’t see why it’s offensive,” and then say sure, you should just keep asking it in public?
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.
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.
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.
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