“We really don’t know how many sign languages there are"
August 23, 2016 3:01 PM   Subscribe

But just as linguists were substantiating its existence, HSL stood on the brink of extinction, remembered by just a handful of signers. Unless the language made a miraculous recovery, Lambrecht feared that her announcement might turn out to be HSL’s obituary.
posted by Chrysostom (5 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
What a great story! It's amazing to think a place as small as Hawai'i, with a typical incidence of deafness, would have a big enough Deaf community to have developed its own sign. Although maybe that shouldn't surprise me. Deaf folks want to talk to each other afterall.

The section of the article about the global rise of ASL has me wondering; has Internet video been good for global sign language usage? Until a few years ago it wasn't really practical to use a sign language on the Internet, there's no commonly used written form. But now you can easily share video of people signing. Has that changed global sign usage?
posted by Nelson at 3:16 PM on August 23, 2016


This is great. I was especially interested in the historical evidence that the same signs had persisted since 1821; who knows how old they really were.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:58 PM on August 23, 2016


What a great story! It's amazing to think a place as small as Hawai'i, with a typical incidence of deafness, would have a big enough Deaf community to have developed its own sign. Although maybe that shouldn't surprise me. Deaf folks want to talk to each other afterall.


I heard a great talk about a sign language that was local to just one or a couple particular villages in Turkey. Maybe it had especially high incidence of deafness? But, yeah, there must be many, many sign languages.
posted by grobstein at 7:34 PM on August 23, 2016


I studied ASL a long time ago and there were a couple of bits in here that reduced my faith in the writer's knowledge base (his description of HSL name signs exactly matches ASL name signs, and he talks about how raised eyebrows mean a yes/no question in HSL but they also do in ASL). Not that I saw anything he wrote that was incorrect. I just wasn't sure whether he knew anything about sign language before launching into this arcane detailed article...

When I was studying ASL people would always ask me if it was the same as English, then ask if it was universal around the world. Both "no" answers would surprise them (even though obviously the two ideas contradict each other). Sometimes they'd say "but why don't all deaf people use the same language?" And I'd say "why don't all hearing people?" I wonder if soon ASL will be the successful Deaf Esperanto and that old conversation I had so many times will be a relic.
posted by hungrytiger at 10:08 PM on August 23, 2016


I would have loved to have seen some examples of HSL sentence structure...
posted by hungrytiger at 10:08 PM on August 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


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