British Sign Language

This article is about British Sign Language. BSL is also an abbreviation for Breed-specific legislation.

Although Great Britain and the United States share English as a spoken language, British Sign Language is distinct from American Sign Language (ASL). BSL fingerspelling is also different from ASL as it uses two hands instead of one. The Makaton system was developed by borrowing signs from British Sign Language. BSL is also distinct from Irish Sign Language (ISL) which is more closely related to French Sign Language(SLF) and ASL. Both BSL and ISL are used in Northern Ireland.

BSL has what could loosely be termed 'accents' or dialects. Signs that are used in Scotland for example, may not always be understood in the South of England, and vice versa. Some signs are even more local, occurring only in certain towns or cities. Likewise, some may go in or out of fashion, or evolve over time, just as terms in spoken languages do.

Despite the dialects, and different sign languages fluent signers don't have much problem communicating with each other. For example a fluent signer of BSL only will quickly communicate with a fluent signer of SLF. This is in comparison to the slow minimal communication of a fluent English (only) speaker and a fluent French (only) speaker.

The systems for sign language used in Australia and New Zealand, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language, were based largely on 19th Century BSL, and all retain the same manual alphabet, grammar and similar lexicon. BSL, Auslan and NZSL together may be called BANZSL.

There have been campaigns to have BSL recognised on a similar level to Welsh and the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland.

Many British television channels broadcast programs with in-vision signing, using BSL, as well as specially made programmes aimed mainly at Deaf people such as the BBC's See Hear and Channel 4's VEE-TV.

See also