Empowering the Deaf
Empowering the Deaf
If gesture is the most rudimentary form of manual communication, then home sign is somewhere in between gesture and full-fledged sign language. Home sign develops, mostly at the level of the family, when a deaf person grows up in isolation from a deaf community. This usually happens in villages because the deaf people there are isolated from the sign language communities in the town and cities.
When deaf signers with some knowledge of spoken language structures and hearing people with some knowledge of sign language try to communicate, the result is often a form of Contact Signing or Pidgin Sign Language. Since this form of signing is influenced by both the primary sign language and the spoken language, which typically have very different grammars.
Many hearing people in India who communicate with deaf people regularly are convinced that they sign very well and that they are using Indian Sign Language when in fact they are using Pidgin Sign Language.
It is a method of communicating that relies on hand gestures and movements, body language, and facial expressions rather than spoken words. Sign languages are prominently use by Deaf and Hard of Hearing people.
Sign Languages are natural human languages that have developed wherever deaf people have come together to form communities. Sign Languages are fully complex human languages that are on a par with spoken languages at every level of linguistic organization means they have their own grammar and lexicon like spoken language.
In Sign Language, fingerspelling is extremely important. A particular sign is there for each letter of the alphabet.
On your hand, you can use these letter signs to spell out words – most commonly names and places – and sentences. If you don’t know or can’t remember some signs, fingerspelling is a simple way to communicate.