The Swedish Sign Language family is a language family of sign languages, including Swedish Sign Language, Portuguese Sign Language, Finnish Sign Language and Eritrean Sign (although going through the process of demissionization).[1]
Swedish SL started about 1800. Henri Wittmann[2] proposes that it descends from British Sign Language. Regardless, Swedish SL in turn gave rise to Portuguese Sign Language (1823) and Finnish Sign Language (1850s), the latter with local admixture; Finnish and Swedish Sign are mutually unintelligible.
Ethnologue reports that Danish Sign Language is largely mutually intelligible with Swedish Sign, though Wittmann places DSL in the French Sign Language family. There are no known dialects in the Swedish Sign Language, however, it is partly intelligible with other manual languages such as Danish (DSL), Norwegian (NSL), and Finnish (FSE).[3]
The Finland-Swedish Sign Language, also known as FinSSL, was created by the deaf community of Swedish backgrounds inhabiting the coastal areas of Finland. It is declared as an independent language given the connection to the Finland-Swedish culture.[4]
Eritrean Sign Language also developed out of the Swedish and Finnish Sign Languages,[5] that were introduced by Swedish and Finnish Christian missionaries in 1955,[5] containing a certain amount of local Eritrean signs and having ASL-based Sudanese influences.[6] According to Moges 2011, 70% of the EriSL and Finnish signs are identical.[5] Since 2005, the Eritrean National Association of the Deaf has made linguistic purification attempts to replace Swedish and Finnish signs from the EriSL lexicon by 'Eritrean' ones in an effort to create a more distinct, "indigenous" language.[5] This process is referred to as 'demissionization'.[1]
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References
- ^ a b Moges, Rezenet Tsegay (2015). It's a Small World. International Deaf Spaces and Encounters. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. pp. 114–125.
- ^ Wittmann, Henri (1991). "Classification linguistique des langues signées non vocalement" (PDF). Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée (in French). 10 (1): 215–288. Archived (PDF) from the original on 6 March 2023.
- ^ "Swedish Sign Language". Ethnologue. Retrieved 2017-09-06.
- ^ Jepsen, Julie (2015). Sign Languages of the World: a Comparative Handbook. De Gruyter.
- ^ a b c d Moges, Rezenet Tsegay (2015). It's a Small World. International Deaf Spaces and Encounters. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. pp. 114–125.
- ^ Moges, Rezenet (January 2008). "Construction in Eritrean Sign Language". R. M. de Quadros (ed.). Editora Arara Azul. Petrópolis/RJ. Brazil. California State University. Retrieved 1 May 2013.
