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Comment by tomcooks | Hacker News Reader

A really dumb question, which a close friend that teaches sign language in Europe couldn't answer to: why do we have different sign languages, one per spoken language, instead of a common international single language?

I understand there's partly nationalism in this, and that if Esperanto taught us something is that international languages are HARD, but I can't help but think that a single standard sign language would help communication between users and easier involvement of speakers.

Again, I hope I don't sound offensive, I'm just curious.

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(disclaimer: I'm not Deaf, just interested in ASL.)

Signs very geographically even in ASL. (See: https://www.reddit.com/r/asl/comments/dcvqo9/is_there_much_d...)

Wouldn't your argument hold for spoken languages as well? Why do we have french and spanish? Because it would be impossible to force most people to learn the other language.

English is the widely spoken for economical reasons and yet that's only 13% of the world population.

No sign language has that kind of pull. We would need TV shows / movies that pushed a particular sign. The internet helps but how do you prevent groups from drifting?

At some point accents become dialect that become languages. Written ASL doesn't seem to be growing.

Why do people communicate in different languages? Because they live in slightly disconnected social circles.

American Sign Language is rooted in French Sign Language, because a teacher at a long-running school for the deaf there came to America to teach.

British Sign Language developed in a different direction, where fingerspelling the alphabet is very different from how it is done in ASL. So even though US and England share a spoken language, signed expression developed differently.

Same deal with signed languages around the world. They generally develop locally and incorporate influences from elsewhere, much as spoken languages do, with the local dominant spoken language having the most influence.

There are two very common misconceptions, which are directly in conflict:

- "sign language" is universal

- signed languages directly correspond with the spoken language

Neither is true. the signed language in the United States and the signed language in the UK are not mutually intelligible.

That said, I am pretty comfortable in claiming that two fluent signers of very different signed languages will have a much easier time bridging a communication gap than the corresponding non-signers in the respective communities, especially since Deaf signers who grow up in a hearing world usually develop many skills around gesturing and bridging communication gaps.

Language and culture are very intertwined (stories, jokes, puns, ...) I am grateful there are many languages in the same way I am grateful for many cultures.

A lot of these sign languages were developed before the Internet or any easy mass communication via video. Each region developed their own language, and at this point it's so ingrained into local cultures that trying to get every sign language user to switch to some international language would be like trying to get everyone to switch to Esperanto. It's not happening.

Because sign languages are languages. Sign languages were not designed by anyone; they develop and evolve organically like any other language. (With the notable exception that we’ve seen totally new sign languages come into existence in isolated deaf communities, but we’ve never seen this for spoken languages.) Deaf communities in France, Britain, Russia, China, Taiwan, Martha’s Vineyard, Nunavut, Bali, Adamorobe and other places have all developed sign languages independently, and there’s no particular reason why one of these should become international at the expense of the others. It’s like asking why the whole world hasn’t been forced to speak English yet — because they happen to like speaking French, Hebrew, Swahili, Korean, Yolŋu or whatever language they speak.

By the way, it may interest you to know that there actually is something called International Sign. But it’s probably not what you’re looking for, since it’s basically just an unstandardised pidgin.

Basically for the same reason we have multiple spoken languages. Sign languages were mostly developed independently by communities of deaf people around the world, with occasional cross-pollination. People often think of e.g. ASL as a translation of American English, but that's not quite true – the grammar, idioms, puns etc. are quite different.

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