Chinese Sign Language

[Ulrike Zeshan]

Dear Prof. Gong Qunhu,

thank you for your very interesting message, and sorry for being late in replying. Because I have just moved here from Australia, I was swamped with all kinds of work. Aynway, the situation you are describing is not unlike other large countries. In India, we also have regional dialects with sometimes substantial vocabulary variation. However, it is very interesting to see that there is almost no variation in the grammatical structures used in sign varieties in the entire Indian subcontinent. I wonder if that is the same in China. Is anyone investigating grammatical variation across sign varieties?

As far as my project is concerned, we will look at two varieties. Jun Hui Yang is from northern China and knows varieties there. She will work in my project for a year. Secondly, Gladys Tang will visit for a few months with her deaf assistant, and they are from Hong Kong. So at least we will be able to look at variants from both the north and the south, for a start.

Can you tell me something more about your project? It seems like there is quite a lot going on in China that nobody outside know about, and you seem to be more advanced than many European countries with bilingual education, deaf teachers in deaf schools, and so on. I hope to hear more about China from you soon.

Regards,

Ulrike Zeshan




GONG Qunhu wrote:

> Dear Dr. Ulrike Zeshan (and all)
>
> I am happy to know that you will include sign language(s) from China in your project.  I wonder  which variaty of CSL  you are going to investigate? There are  regional CSL dialects in China and the "standard" is weak.  In fact the  term "Zhongguo Shouyu"(Chinese Sign Language) is either an all-encompassing title for all the regional dialects or , to most deaf people and educators, a list of 5000 plus words(for some reason, with very heavy influence of Shanghai sign language in the first half of the words) intended to be promoted officially as a common speech -- but the current situation is that deaf people in all major cities only sign their own "Difang Shouyu" (local sign language).
>
> I am a hearing linguist. I have been working on a project of CSL(Shanghai) investigation and analysis.  A couple of  weeks ago,  I got a chance to do preliminary field investigation of local sign language words of 15 cities with the Swadesh list (200 lexical items):  there are differences/variations in core words as one expected. I did it in Dalian at the first summer training class for deaf teachers in China, and all my informants are deaf teachers from deaf schools across China.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Gong Qunhu
>
> Prof. of Linguistics
> Fudan University, Shanghai
> China