Danish Sign Language family

Summary

The Danish Sign Language family comprises three languages: Danish Sign Language, Norwegian Sign Language (including Malagasy Sign Language) and Icelandic Sign Language. It itself is a sub-language family within the larger French Sign Language family.[1]

Danish Sign Language Family
West Scandinavian Sign
EthnicityDiverse
Deaf populations
Geographic
distribution
Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Madagascar
Linguistic classificationFrench Sign
  • Danish Sign Language Family
Subdivisions
Glottologwest2993  (West Scandinavian Sign)

Ethnologue reports that Danish Sign Language is largely mutually intelligible with Swedish Sign, despite having been assigned different families by Wittmann (1991).

Danish Sign Language family tree
French Sign
(c. 1760–present)
local/home sign
Danish Sign
(c. 1800–present)
Faroese Sign
(c. 1960–present)
Greenlandic Sign
(c. 1950–present)
Icelandic Sign
(c. 1910–present)
Norwegian Sign
(c. 1820–present)
Malagasy Sign
(c. 1950–present)


References edit

  1. ^ Bergman, Brita; Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth (2010). "Transmission of sign languages in the Nordic countries". In Brentari, Diane (ed.). Sign Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 74–94. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511712203. ISBN 978-0521883702.

External links edit

  • Aldersson, Russell R. and Lisa J. McEntee-Atalianis. 2007. A Lexical Comparison of Icelandic Sign Language and Danish Sign Language. Birkbeck Studies in Applied Linguistics Vol 2. A Lexical Comparison of Icelandic Sign Language and Danish Sign Language
  • Wittmann, Henri (1991). "Classification linguistique des langues signées non vocalement" (PDF). Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée (in French). 10 (1): 215–288. Archived (PDF) from the original on 6 March 2023.