Sociolinguistics Symposium 14 and the standardisation of sign languages

[Dan Parvaz]

> 2) Is it happening in Belgium or other countries?  I'd like to hear from
> anyone who's involved in recognition advocacy who's been confronted with
> demands like this.

In the Arab world, there have been repeated calls for the creation of a
pan-Arab sign language, but not AFAIK in the name of recognition. Every
few years (hearing) representatives from various Arab ministries of
education get together and discuss creating a regional standard to be used
as a language of instruction.

Whether the idea is to replace local SLs or to function as a koine, I am
not certain. If the latter, this is probably supposed to mirror the
realities of spoken Arabic where each area has its own spoken variety, as
well as a Classical lingua franca with its roots in the language of the
Qur'an (and further back to the pre-Islamic poets).

In fact, this seems to provide a partial impetus for cataloguing national
SLs. I just read another reference to this effort in the preface to a
"dictionary" of Tunisian SL, stating that the reason for producing the
dictionary was to contribute lexical items to a pan-Arab sign language.
There has already been some limited success in creating and disseminating
an Arabic manual alphabet. Sxajnas al mi, ke la revo de Zamenhof ankoraux
vivas. :-)

Is this sort of attempt happening anywhere else?

Cheers,

Dan.

____________
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.. .   D A N  P A R V A Z  --  Geek-in-Residence
 U    University of New Mexico Linguistics Dept
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