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Irish Sign Language |
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Irish Sign Language (ISL, Irish: Teanga Chomharthaíochta na hÉireann) is the sign language of Ireland, used primarily in the
Republic of Ireland. It is also used in Northern Ireland, though British Sign Language (BSL) is also used there. Irish Sign
Language is more closely related to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language, which was first used in Dublin, Ireland.
It has influenced sign languages in Australia and South Africa, and has little relation to either spoken Irish or English.
The Irish Deaf Society says that ISL arose from within deaf communities, was developed by deaf people themselves and has been
in existence for hundreds of years, but according to Ethnologue the language arose in its current form in 1846 and 1849 in
the girls' and boys' schools respectively, BSL having been introduced in Dublin in 1816. The first school for deaf children
in Ireland was established in 1816 by Dr. Charles Orpen. The Claremont Institute was a Protestant institution and given that
Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom, it is no surprise that BSL (or some version of signed English based in BSL) was
used for teaching and learning (Pollard 2006). McDonnell (1979) reports that the Irish institutions - Catholic and Protestant
- did not teach the children to speak and it was not until 1887 that Claremont report changing from a manual to an oral approach.
For the Catholic schools, the shift to oralism came later: St. Mary's School for Deaf Girls moved to an oral approach in 1946
and St. Joseph's School for Deaf Boys shifted to oralism in 1956, though this did not become formal state policy until 1972.
Sign language use was seriously suppressed and religion was used to further stigmatise the language (e.g. children were encouraged
to give up signing for Lent and sent to confession if caught signing). The fact that the Catholic schools are segregated on
the basis of gender led to the development of a gendered-generational variant of Irish Sign Language that is still evident
(albeit to a lesser degree) today. ISL was brought by Catholic missionaries to Australia and South Africa, and to Scotland
and England, with remnants of ISL still visible in some variants of BSL, especially in Glasgow, and with some elderly Auslan
Catholics still using ISL today. The ISO 639-3 code for Irish Sign Language is 'isg'; 'isl' is the code for Icelandic. |
Names (more)[en] Irish Sign Language[fr] Langue des signes irlandaise |
Language type : Living
Technical notes
This page is providing structured data for the language Irish Sign Language. |
ISO 639 CodesISO 639-3 : isgLinked Data URIshttp://lexvo.org/id/iso639-3/isghttp://dbpedia.org/resource/ISO_639:isg More URIs at sameas.org SourcesAuthority documentation for ISO 639 identifier: isgFreebase ISO 639-3 : isg GeoNames.org Country Information Publications Office of the European Union Metadata Registry : Countries and Languages |