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Happy International Week of Deaf People!
NWDP 2025 THEME No Human Rights Without Sign Language Rights 22 – 28 September 2025 NWDP 2025 DAILY THEMES Deaf Australia is proud to host t
Today is the start of International Week of Deaf People. Use the link above to look at the themes for the week. To celebrate, why not look at your local signed language, learn about Deaf culture, and maybe consume some content by Deaf creators!
Deaf flag (Sign Union)
Design by Arnaud Balard. SVG version here.
Text from the World Federation of the Deaf:
"Turquoise Blue represents the deaf community and Sign Language, pride and unity.
Yellow represents the color of light, an enlightened spirit, life and "thriving in unison".
Dark Blue represents the earth, humanity and living in accordance with the planet. It is also the color of the WFD, our logo is blue, we wear blue ribbons in support of deaf people, and deaf cultures all over the world recognize blue as representing deaf people. On the International Day of Sign Languages we even celebrate by shining a blue light! Blue is deeply connected to the roots of the deaf community.
All of these colors together represent an awareness of humanity as inherently diverse, a diversity of peoples and languages on Earth. This flag shows that we are here, we belong to this world, we are a part of humanity. Deaf people are a part of a rich diversity that makes humanity better."
Originally posted here on reddit.
"Hello everyone, I am a PhD student at the University of Georgia studying sign second language acquisition. I am looking for hearing ASL learners to take part in an exploratory study. If you have the time to help out a poor grad student I would greatly appreciate it!"
I'm not the OP but she gave me permission to signal boost this here. Please participate if you can!
don't mind me spam-reblogging "Link uses a signed language" posts, just collecting inspiration for my next fic 😉
Information Morning Cape Breton spoke with the people behind a project to translate the Mi'kmaq Honour Song into sign language. We have provided a transcript of this interview for the hearing impaired.
Video followed by an excerpt from the interview:
Steve: Can you tell me a little bit about the process, how you take the Mi'kmaq Honour Song and turn it into sign language? What was the process?
Holly: It was a little bit of a complicated process because we are talking about translating the Mi'kmaw sung language into signs and how to make those connection points there. So you do have to use colonized languages as a bridge to get there, but we really didn't want to dwell in those spaces for too long, so we spoke with the community, with language keepers, what the words really meant and tried to find equivalents to signs to convey those meanings. So we worked just to feel what the feeling was in each of the words, in each of the concepts, and between the two of us, Sheila and I, we talked about what signs would be the most conceptually accurate to depict those meanings.
Steve: And just out of curiosity, do you also use American Sign Language?
Holly: Yeah, especially during the translation process, we had a lot of those conversations in ASL and we had Mi'kmaw elders, who were hearing people, who spoke to us in English, using ASL-English interpreters and Mi'kmaq spoken language, as well. So we were using all of these languages that we had available to us, plus Sheila and I, taking all of that information, using the old Mi'kmaw signs and the sign language that she has to come up with the language that you see in the Honour Song.
It was a large group of us together. It was a little bit of a complicated process with Mi'kmaw language speakers, sign language interpreters working in the room, and all of us coming together to create this. It was a complicated process, but an enjoyable one.
Study shows how kids could play a role in spontaneously emerging languages.
An interesting article about an experiment in language evolution, by Cathleen O’Grady for Ars Technica. Excerpt:
The children had to play a game similar to charades. One of them had to convey a meaning, like “bicycle” to their partner, who then had to choose the correct picture from an array. The kids weren’t told to gesture—they were just told to communicate and placed in a situation where speech wasn’t an option.
The very youngest children, who were four years old, had to be prompted to use gestures. But six-year-old kids figured it out quickly on their own, and played the game with each other with high levels of success.
The same pictures came up repeatedly throughout the game. This gave the researchers the chance to see what happened when the kids had to refer to the same concept over and over again. They found that the children quickly developed conventions, with their gestures bearing less obvious resemblance to the ideas they were trying to communicate.
In one pair, Bohn says, the child had the tricky task of communicating a blank white space—the idea of “nothing.” After a few failed attempts, she noticed a white spot on her shirt and pulled her t-shirt to the side, pointing to the spot. Her trick worked, and her partner guessed correctly.
In the next round, when the blank image came up again, the other child pulled her shirt to the side and pointed to it—even though her shirt had no white spot. In a single round, the gesture had gone from being tangibly linked to the concept of “nothing” to being completely divorced from it. An outsider looking in wouldn’t be able to figure out what the gesture meant by looking at it—just like in real languages, where no-one can figure out what “elephant” means just from the shape of the word.
In a later experiment, six- and eight-year-old children also started to develop mini-grammars by establishing “words” that they could combine in different ways. For instance, instead of gesturing “a big duck” by using the “duck” gesture with bigger movements, they developed a sign for “big” that they could use with a range of different words. When they combined gestures, they didn’t stick to German word order, which suggests a limit to how much their native language was coming in to play.
Read the whole thing.
So was no one going to tell me that there was an indigenous North American lingua franca that was signed or did I have to find that out in an obscure free linguistics textbook for myself?
Edit for link sources: Plains Sign Talk Free Linguistics 101 textbook with videos
Properly closed captioned in English.
Finally! a series about language-in-general that: A) Includes Signed Languages as a matter of course, and B) Makes the point that Signed Languages are just as abstract and arbitrary as spoken languages.
There’s an idea out there (usually, but not exclusively held by Hearing people) that Signed Languages are just a step or two away from charades, so they’re not considered as “real” as spoken languages, and aren’t included in discussions of how language evolved in our hominid ancestors (as in: assuming that advanced human language couldn’t exist before we had the physical capability to produce complex vocal speech).
And I’ve been trying to push back against that idea for decades, and have not had much luck finding backup sources that I could point to -- until now.
I think a lot of people get the idea that Signed Languages are less abstract than Spoken ones because of how the vocabulary is taught in beginners’ classes -- it’s easier to remember a bunch of different new words if you’re given a visual cue to attach to them.
