Chinese Sign Language

[GONG Qunhu]

Dear Dr. Ulrlike Zeshan:

Thank you for your email. My CSL project is "A Linguistic Investigation of CSL(Shanghai)" ,  the outcome is supposed to be a  field description of (mainly) the Shanghai variety of CSL in the form of a book or books. As far as I know, no one is working on  grammatical difference of regional varieties of CSL.  it is too early  to say that there is no variation in grammatical structure.

Ms. Jun Hui Yang knows well about deaf education in China, I am sure she will talk about it during her 1 year collaboration with you. There is one thing I would like let  you and other friends know:  oralism in China was (and is) not as strict as that in some western countries. I remember  I used CSL very freely in my class  when I was a teacher for the deaf 22 years ago ( this situation in the 90s was described by Jaime Cohenin in his article 'Sino signing .. the sweet and the sour', Signpost, vol.7 num.2 1994., he stayed in Chengdu,Sichuan  for 4 mouths and made regular visits to a school for the deaf there  "...But Chinese sign langauge was used as the primary means of communication and teaching. the benefits of using British Sign Langauge with profoundly deaf children has been recognised by some educationalists in Britain. For further support they need look no further than this school in Chengdu!" ).

But our bilingual education still has a long way to go, CSL has not been regarded as a genuine human language academically.

Best wishes,

Gong Qunhu





-----Original Message-----
From: For the discussion of linguistics and signed languages. [mailto:SLLING-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA]On Behalf Of Ulrike Zeshan
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2003 3:46 PM
To: SLLING-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA
Subject: Re: Chinese Sign Language


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