Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages.
Linguists consider both spoken and signed communication to be types of natural language, meaning that both emerged through an abstract, protracted aging process and evolved over time without meticulous planning. This is supported by the fact that there is substantial overlap between the neural substrates of sign and spoken language processing, despite the obvious differences in modality. Sign language should not be confused with body language, a type of nonverbal communication.
Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages have developed as useful means of communication and form the core of local Deaf cultures. Although signing is used primarily by the deaf and hard of hearing, it is also used by hearing individuals, such as those unable to physically speak, those who have trouble with oral language due to a disability or condition (augmentative and alternative communication), and those with deaf family members including children of deaf adults.
The number of sign languages worldwide is not precisely known. Each country generally has its own native sign language; some have more than one. The 2021 edition of Ethnologue lists 150 sign languages, while the SIGN-HUB Atlas of Sign Language Structures lists over 200 and notes that there are more which have not been documented or discovered yet. As of 2021, Indo Sign Language is the most used sign language in the world, and Ethnologue ranks it as the 151st most "spoken" language in the world.
Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The modern-day scientific study of linguistics takes all aspects of language into account — i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as descriptive study of language, and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages.
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often, a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period of time. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar (e.g.
This course focuses on the physical mechanisms at the origin of the transition of a flow from laminar to turbulent using the hydrodynamic instability theory.
Le TP de physiologie introduit les approches expérimentales du domaine biomédical, avec les montages de mesure, les capteurs, le conditionnement des signaux, l'acquisition et traitement de données.
Le
Le TP de physiologie introduit les approches expérimentales du domaine biomédical, avec les montages de mesure, les capteurs, le conditionnement des signaux, l'acquisition et traitement de données.
Le
Explores compositions of applications and injectivity conditions in linear algebra, including restriction of applications and combinatorial proof of injections.
The Dependent Object Type (DOT) calculus was designed to put Scala on a sound basis, but while DOT relies on structural subtyping, Scala is a fundamentally class-based language. This impedance mismatch means that a proof of DOT soundness by itself is ...
Transformer models such as GPT generate human-like language and are predictive of human brain responses to language. Here, using functional-MRI-measured brain responses to 1,000 diverse sentences, we first show that a GPT-based encoding model can predict t ...
Berlin2024
, , , , ,
A method for aggregating digital signatures comprises the following steps carried out by a signature aggregator: receiving first data packages from signers, each first data package comprising a signer identifier, a payload, and a payload signature; verifyi ...