Sign language in China
I’ve recently been reminded of a couple misconceptions about sign language. Many people believe that there is a singular sign language, and that all who sign to communicate are able to understand each other. It’s similar to the idea that all Sinitic languages are written the same (they’re not) and that if only they would write the characters anyone can understand anyone else with 100% efficiency (they can’t). For sign language, it’s actually much worse.
Another common misconception is that sign language is just a 1:1 replacement of spoken words with hand gestures. This is also not true. In fact the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL) differs significantly from that of spoken American English. Oddly, some people have expressed both of these misconceptions, despite being inherently contradictory.
But back to the single sign language idea. I was recently sitting in an airport cafe with time to kill and a Kindle with which to kill it. I ended up sitting next to a group of about seven or eight tourists from Hong Kong, all of whom were hearing impaired and thus communicating through signing. I was asked to take their photo, which I then used as an opportunity to strike up a conversation.
In fact and unsurprisingly, I cannot in any way distinguish one sign language from another unless it happens to be ASL and they happen to be using one of the handful of words I know. Had I not outright asked where they were coming from, I’d have never been able to guess they were from Hong Kong. I only knew that they had an itinerary written in a Sinitic language, so with the help of typing on mobile phones we were able to communicate in written Mandarin. But I digress. As I’m always interested in uncommon (to me) linguistic encounters, I tweeted something to the effect after I’d spoken to them. Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan was kind enough to clarify a few points about HKSL, CSL, TWSL and JSL (Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Japan):
HKSL is a relative of CSL while Taiwan SL is related to Japan SL and pretty much mutually unintelligible.
This isn’t that surprising knowing the history of Taiwan. Though I suppose I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Hong Kong uses British sign language, which they don’t. Neither does Singapore, it turns out. They use American Sign Language, which is different still.
I’ve always wanted to learn to communicate through signing. Obviously not enough to have done it yet. But I’ll keep that ‘yet’ on there and maybe in the future it’ll happen.
Actually I meant to write a post on Chinese sign language a year and a half ago when I came upon a book on the topic in the Fuzhou Road book stores in Shanghai. I never bought the book, but always wished I had.
More on all this later.
- Links / References:
- An online dictionary / reference for CSL
- website for the Hong Kong Association for the Deaf (香港聾人協進會)
- the Hong Kong Sign Language Association (香港手語協會)
- 52shouyu.com which also has a dictionary and some phrases for mainland Chinese sign language
I have been thinking about Chinese sign language for some time. So cool to see you put up an article on this subject! Will enjoy reading it.
thanks!
It’s my understanding that British and American sign languages are mutually unintelligible. I wonder how many spoken languages have multiple well codified sign languages “affiliated” with them (as opposed to the spontaneous idiolects of deaf people and their families—those are no limitless around the world).
Josh,
Glad to hear it. I’m planning on doing more on the subject soon.
Carl,
Absolutely right. I’d imagine the affiliated ones all just started out as idiolects and later gained traction. I’ve heard ASL has more SOV structure, obviously a big difference from AmE. That’d make sense if it was truly an independent evolution and the affiliation were geographical but not otherwise tied to the non-signed language variations.
When I was in high school I was one of those who mistakenly thought that sign language was a universal ideographic language: learn it and you’re set for international travel and communication! It didn’t take me long to figure out I was wrong, so I dropped out. But I still remember a little.
In the PRC, signing has been frowned upon. But the situation has been improving.
For Taiwan’s sign language, see the site of the Táiwān Shǒuyǔ Yánjiū Qún. The dictionary there has lots of videos.
Sign here in PRC is much like the Mandarin, yes there is a, so-called, “standard” – but if you actually try to communicate with people they’re more likely to use their, so-called, “dialect”. As the same thing with Mandarin, perhaps they don’t even know what the ‘standard’ is, or they are just much more comfortable using the language they talk at home, with friends, etc. Anyhow if you good at charades, it shouldn’t be much of a problem. : )
If you’re really interested you can at least start with this video:
手语，手语100句合集
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTIzODE1NTQ4.html
ASL uses SVO order, despite the efforts of self-proclaimed Guardians of the Language to force it into OSV order (The latter emerges only when the object is topicalized.) WHY? ASL FULL DIFFERENT ENGLISH!
Singapore primarily uses Signed English, not ASL. They have a vernacular sign language that appears to be a creole derived from Signed Exact English (with its many ASL and ASL-derived signs) and Southern CSL. It acts much like Singlish does in relation to Standard English. There is a lot of mutual intelligibility with ASL signers, though.