International Day of Sign Languages

  In an attempt to understand certain similarities across sign languages , some interesting suggestions have been made about the role of iconicity (transparent correspondence between form and meaning) in shaping sign language grammar . Such a possibility runs counter to the by now traditional view that grammatical structure and iconicity are mutually exclusive. This more traditional view assumed, with Saussure (1959), that the elements of language , to be language, must be arbitrary. Therefore, it was assumed to follow that whatever is iconic about sign language is not “ linguistic .” Nowadays, however, there is such an abundance of solid evidence that sign languages are real linguistic systems in every sense of the word, that it is possible to take a fresh look at the whole issue. Allowing for the possibility that iconicity contributes to grammatical structure in sign language opens the door to the possibility that general cognitive concepts – such as spatial relations among refe...

  For the International Day of Sign Languages 2022 ( September 23rd ), UN Geneva, in partnership with the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) and others, hosted a high-level panel discussion under the theme "Sign Languages Unite Us!" at the Palais des Nations, featuring UN officials, WFD experts, and Member State representatives to promote awareness, linguistic diversity, and human rights for Deaf communities , including discussions on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)

  Current linguistic theory which hypothesizes that humans are genetically endowed with the fundamental underpinnings of language is supported by the claim that languages are similar to each other in significant ways. This view gains further support from the sign language findings reported in the previous sections. As we mentioned earlier, current theories are also based on the related observation that children acquire language automatically, including aspects of the system that do not seem directly retrievable from the input they receive. This section reviews phases of  The acquisition of sign language , to see whether this process has the hallmarks of automaticity and systematicity that are found in spoken language acquisition. If sign languages  represent the same cognitive system as spoken languages do, then they should be acquired in a similar way. If, on the other hand, the modality somehow prevents sign languages from belonging to the same cognitive system, the...