International Day of Sign Languages (23 September)

[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.

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.

[Aidan Kehoe]

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."
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.