British Sign Language

Categories: Languages of the United Kingdom | Sign languages

British sign language (BSL) is the sign language used in the United Kingdom (UK). BSL is the first or preferred language of nearly 250,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the UK. It is a language of space and movement using the hands, body, face and head. Many thousands of hearing people also use BSL.

Although the United Kingdom and the United States to a large degree share English as a spoken language, British Sign Language is distinct from American Sign Language (ASL). BSL fingerspelling is also different from ASL as it uses two hands instead of one. The Makaton system was developed by borrowing signs from British Sign Language. BSL is also distinct from Irish Sign Language (ISG)((ISL is Israeli Sign Language, while ISG is Irish Sign Language)) which is more closely related to French Sign Language (LSF) and ASL. Both BSL and ISG are used in Northern Ireland.

BSL has what could loosely be termed 'accents' or dialects. Signs that are used in Scotland for example, may not always be understood in the South of England, and vice versa. Some signs are even more local, occurring only in certain towns or cities. Likewise, some may go in or out of fashion, or evolve over time, just as terms in spoken languages do.

In spite of the dialects, fluent signers do not have much diffculty communicating with each other, even if they are signing in different sign languages. A fluent signer of BSL only will quickly be able to communicate with a fluent signer of LSF. In comparison, it is often nearly impossible for native speakers of English, and French to communicate if they do not speak the other's language.

The systems for sign language used in Australia and New Zealand, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language, were based largely on 19th Century BSL, and all retain the same manual alphabet, grammar and similar lexicon. BSL, Auslan and NZSL together may be called BANZSL.

BSL users campaigned to have BSL recognised on a similar level to Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish. BSL was recognised as an official British language by the UK government on 18 March 2003, but it does not have any legal protection. In New Zealand, New Zealand Sign Language is soon joining English and Maori to become the third official language of New Zealand.

Many British television channels broadcast programs with in-vision signing, using BSL, as well as specially made programmes aimed mainly at deaf people such as the BBC's See Hear and Channel 4's VEE-TV.

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