In his book, 'Britain’s Deaf Heritage', Peter Jackson speculates that the presence of sign languages among Australian aborigines, Kalahari Bush People and North American Plains Indians suggests that the use of sign language goes back to prehistoric times.īSL has been in use for hundreds of years. The earliest recorded instance of gestural communication among Deaf people occurs in the Talmud. BSL is a visual-gestural language with a distinctive grammar using handshapes, facial expressions, gestures and body language to convey meaning.

Sign languages are fully functional and expressive languages at the same time they differ profoundly from spoken languages.

Leicestershire Deaf Forum COVID-19 Projectīritish Sign Language (BSL) is the preferred language of over 87,000 Deaf people in the UK for whom English may be a second or third language (A total of 151,000 individuals in the UK who can use BSL - this figure does not include professional BSL users, Interpreters, Translators, etc unless they use BSL at home).

How to sign won in sign language