Not everyone knows this so im gonna tell you. Countries that speak the same spoken language will not necessarily use the same sign language.
For example, American Sign Language and French Sign Language are related and I’ve known ASL users who have said they could stumble through communication with people who use LSF.
British sign language is completely unrelated to ASL however. The two languages have almost nothing in common. BSL is related to Australian sign language but Auslan and BSL still aren’t the same language.
Mexico from what I gather has at least three completely unrelated sign languages, though LSM is the most widely used. Mainland China and Taiwan use completely different unrelated sign languages despite both countries using Mandarin. Portuguese sign language is influenced by Swedish sign language while Brazilian sign language is influenced by LSF. In most of Canada they use ASL but in Quebec they have their own unique sign language that’s still related to ASL and LSF. Nicaraguan sign language is a unique language naturally developed by children in a school for the deaf and is completely unrelated to the sign languages around it in other Spanish speaking countries.
I could go on and on and on. There’s hundreds of sign languages out there and they don’t follow the same geographic lines that spoken ones do. Keep that in mind.
This! Sign Languages have deep histories and complex differences! They're real languages that develop wherever there are Deaf people and don't have much to do with spoken languages at all. In America at one point we had another regional sign language, Martha's vineyard sign language, that was pretty much only used on one island in Massachusetts, but everyone there, hearing and Deaf, was fluent in it. Modern ASL has a lot of influence from LSF and MVSL as well as some Native American Sign Languages. Sadly, as far as I know, only ASL and LSF are still used, and the sign languages that fell to obscurity are nearly entirely forgotten due to the difficulties of notating/recording up until video cameras became widespread. Which is insane considering MVSL only died out in the 50s, and yet we have little idea what it would've looked like other than a handful of signs.
Something about sign language linguistics is so fascinating to me. It's only because of events LIKE the creation of Nicaraguan Sign Language that we know what early language creation can look like. Deaf people are one of the only groups that can be easily deprived of language and not taught to communicate, which is tragic and causes a lot of problems in so many ways. However that also allows them to be a group that can independently create a language when they have access to community.
Idk I just think it's really cool
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