- French Sign Language
language
name=French Sign Language
caption=LSF in Frenchmanual alphabet
nativename=LSF, "langue des signes française"
fam1=Old French Sign Language
states=France ,Switzerland ,Mali ,Rwanda , Congo,Togo ,Vietnam
signers=estimated 80,000–300,000
iso2=sgn-FR|iso3=fslFrench Sign Language (langue des signes française or LSF) is the
sign language of thedeaf in the nation ofFrance . According toEthnologue , it has 50,000 to 100,000 native signers.French Sign Language is related to
Dutch Sign Language (NGT),German Sign Language (DGS),Flemish Sign Language (VGT),Belgian-French Sign Language (LSFB)Irish Sign Language (ISL),American Sign Language (ASL), andQuebec Sign Language (LSQ).History
French Sign Language is frequently, though mistakenly, attributed to the work of
Charles Michel de l'Épée (l'abbé de l'Épée). In fact, he is said to have discovered the already existing language by total accident; having ducked into a nearby house to escape the rain, he fell upon a pair of twin sisters, deaf, and was struck by the richness and complexity of the language that they used to communicate among themselves and the deaf Parisian community. The abbé set himself to learning the language, now known asOld French Sign Language , and eventually he established a free school for the deaf. At this school, he developed a system he called "methodical signs", to teach his students how to read and write. The abbé was eventually able to make public demonstrations (1771 to 1774) of his system, demonstrations that attracted educators and celebrities from all over the continent and that popularised the idea that the deaf could be educated, especially by gesture.The methodical signs he created were a mixture of sign language words he had learned with some grammatical terms he invented. The resulting combination, an artificial language, was over-complicated and completely unusable by his students. For example, where his system would elaborately construct the word "unintelligible" with a chain of 5 signs ("interior-understand-possible-adjective-not"), the deaf natural language would simply say "understand-impossible". LSF was not invented by the abbé, but his major contributions to the deaf community were to recognize that the deaf did not need spoken language to be able to think, and to indirectly accelerate the natural growth of the language by virtue of putting so many deaf students under a single roof.
French Sign Language flourished from this point until the late 1800s at which point a schism between the manualist and oralist schools of thought had long developed. In 1880 the Milan International Congress of Teachers for the Deaf-Mute convened and decided that the oralist tradition would be preferred. In due time, the use of sign language was treated as a barrier to learning to talk, and thus forbidden from the classroom.
This situation remained unchanged in France until the late 1970s, when the deaf community began to militate for greater recognition of sign language and for a bilingual education system. In 1991 the National Assembly passed the Fabius law, officially authorising the use of LSF for the education of deaf children. A law was passed in 2004 fully recognising LSF as a language in its own right.
Alphabet
The
French manual alphabet is used both to distinguish signs of FSL and to incorporate French words while signing.See also
*
Old French Sign Language External links
* [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=fsl Ethnologue entry on LSF]
* [http://www.wiksign.org Wiksign, Wiki LSF Dictionary] fr "( [http://lsf.wiksign.org/wiki/Special:Allpages?namespace=104 English index] available)"
* [http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/LSF The LSF wikibook] fr
* [http://www.websourd.org/ WebSourd - site in French and LSF] fr
* [http://cis.gouv.fr/ General informations on LSF and Deaf community] fr
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.