Sign language is a language of conveying meaning and getting across message with the help of body language, lip movements, hand movements, expressions in the face, etc. With practice, people converse fluently using the sign language.
This was commonly developed in deaf communities which consisted of friends, interpreters, and families of deaf people, and also people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Like how the spoken language differs from region to region even this differs though people using different sign languages can communicate easier than when people using different languages meet.
There are many different sign languages which have developed over a period of time. The complex spatial grammar of the languages differs from that of the spoken language and it can be used to discuss any topic, from the simple and concrete to the lofty as well as abstract.
There are hundreds of types existing in the deaf communities across the world while most of them have no recognition status at all! They are as rich as oral language in every possible way and linguists have proclaimed them to be fit to be classified as true languages.
The signs are mostly arbitrary and they mostly do not have any visual relationship to the word referred to. Manual alphabets are used mostly for proper names and technical or specialized vocabulary. The many unique linguistic features which emerge from the languages’ ability are to produce the meanings in different parts of the visual field simultaneously.
People are usually mistaken in the sense that they think a sign language depends on the oral languages entirely and that they are actually oral languages which are spelt out in action. This language exploits the unique features of the visual medium because the oral language being linear only one sound can be made or received at a time whereas in this language a whole scene can be taken in at once as it is visual.
Several channels of information can be expressed simultaneously. Parents of deaf children should introduce the language to the ward as early as possible. The earlier the child is exposed to sign languages and begins to acquire language will result in better development of the ward’s communication skills.
Researchers say that the first six months are the most crucial stage to the development of a child’s language skills. Screening for deafness and partial hearing losses have to be executed on all new borns before they leave the hospital or maximum within the first month of life.
Becoming fully competent in any language a person exposure to that language must begin as early as possible and definitely before school age. In an occasion where the existence of deaf people are high enough a single deaf sign language is taken up by an entire local community. Countries may have two or more of this language but an area that contains more than one oral language can have only one it.