Chinese Sign Language

Official sign language of the PRC

Chinese Sign Language (abbreviated CSL or ZGS; ) is the official sign language of China. It is different from the Taiwanese Sign Language and is known in Taiwan as Wénfǎ Shǒuyǔ .

The first references to sign language in Chinese literature date from the Tang dynasty, documenting a sign for 'mirror'. In the Song Dynasty, Su Dongpo describes a community that employed a form of sign language. Another school for the deaf was established in Shanghai in 1897 by a French Catholic organization. Chinese Sign Language was grown out of these two bases. Schools, workshops and farms for the Deaf in diverse locations are the main ways that CSL has been able to spread in China so well. Other deaf people who are not connected to these gathering places tend to use sets of gestures developed in their own homes, known as home sign. The Chinese National Association of the Deaf was created by deaf people mostly from the United States in 1992. The main reason for the creation of the organization was to raise the quality of living for the deaf, which was behind the quality of living standards provided for other disabled persons. Their main goals are to improve the welfare of the deaf, encourage education about the Deaf and Chinese Sign Language, and promote the needs of the Deaf community in China.

There are two main dialects of Chinese Sign Language: Southern CSL (centered on Shanghai and influenced by French Sign Language) and Northern CSL (coming out of the Chefoo School of Deaf and influenced by American Sign Language (ASL)). The Shanghai dialect is found in Malaysia and Taiwan, but Chinese Sign Language is unrelated to Taiwanese Sign Language (which is part of the Japanese family), Malaysian Sign Language (of the French family), or to Tibetan Sign Language (isolate). CSL shares morphology for forming negative clauses with British Sign Language; it may be that this is due to historical contact with the British in Shanghai. It is a one handed manual alphabet, most similar to languages in the Francosign family such as the French and American manual alphabets. A key feature of the fingerspelling is the treatment of pinyin ZH, CH, SH and NG as single fingerspelling signs, rather than sequences of two letter signs, as would be expected from the pinyin; this reflects the phonemic status of these oral sounds in Standard Chinese phonology. The Chinese culture and language heavily influence signs in CSL. For example, there is no generic word for "brother" in CSL, only two distinct signs, one for "older brother" and one for "younger brother". This parallels Chinese, which also specifies "older brother" or "younger brother" rather than simply "brother". Similarly, the sign for "eat" incorporates a pictorial representation for chopsticks instead of using the hand as in ASL.