South African Sign Language
sign language in South Africa
South African Sign Language (SASL, Afrikaans: Suid-Afrikaanse Gebaretaal) is the primary sign language used by deaf people in South Africa. The South African government added a National Language Unit for South African Sign Language in 2001. SASL is not the only manual language used in South Africa but it is being promoted as the language to be used, although Deaf people in South Africa historically do not form a single group.
In 1995, the previous South African National Council for the Deaf (SANCD) was transformed into the Deaf Federation of South Africa (DeafSA), which resulted in a radical policy change in matters for Deaf people in South Africa, such as the development and adoption of a single sign language and the promotion of sign language over oralism. Schools for the deaf have remained largely untransformed, however, and different schools for Deaf children in South African still use different sign language systems. At several schools for the Deaf the use of any sign language is either discouraged or simply not taught. There are as many as twelve different systems of signed oral language in South Africa.
In addition to South African sign languages, American Sign Language (ASL) is also used by some Deaf people in South Africa. Most local sign languages in South Africa show the influence of American Sign Language.
In South Africa, newscasts on television employ the sign language known as SASL. The South African parliament also uses sign language, however different sign language interpreters are known to use various signals for the same topics.
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This entry incorporates text from “South African Sign Language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.