DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AMERICAN SIGN LAN­GUAGE (ASL) AND BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE (BSL)

JACHOVA, Zora and KOVACHEVA, Olivera and KAROVSKA, Aleksandra (2008) DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AMERICAN SIGN LAN­GUAGE (ASL) AND BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE (BSL). Journal of Special Education and Rehabilitation, 9 (1-2). pp. 41-54. ISSN 1409-6099

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Abstract

In the communication of deaf people between them­selves and hearing people there are three ba­sic as­pects of interaction: gesture, finger signs and writing. The gesture is a conditionally agreed manner of communication with the help of the hands followed by face and body mimic. The ges­ture and the move­ments pre-exist the speech and they had the purpose to mark something, and later to emphasize the speech expression. Stokoe was the first linguist that realised that the signs are not a whole that can not be analysed. He analysed signs in insignificant parts that he called “chemeres”, and many linguists today call them pho­nemes. He created three main phoneme catego­ries: hand position, location and movement. Sign languages as spoken languages have back­ground from the distant past. They developed par­allel with the development of spoken language and undertook many historical changes. Therefore, to­day they do not represent a replacement of the spoken language, but are languages themselves in the real sense of the word. Although the structures of the English language used in USA and in Great Britain is the same, still their sign languages-ASL and BSL are different.

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