The Swedish Sign Language family is a

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign ...

s, including Swedish Sign Language,

Portuguese Sign Language Portuguese Sign language () is a sign language used mainly by deaf people in Portugal. It is recognized in the present Constitution of Portugal The present Constitution of Portugal was adopted in 1976 after the Carnation Revolution. It was ...

, and

Finnish Sign Language Finnish Sign Language () is the sign language most commonly used in Finland. There are 3,000 ''(2012 estimate)'' Finnish deaf who have Finnish Sign Language as a first language. As the Finnish system records users by their written language, not ...

. Swedish SL started about 1800. Wittmann (1991) proposes that it descends from

British Sign Language British Sign Language (BSL) is a sign language used in the United Kingdom (UK), and is the first or preferred language among the Deaf community in the UK. Based on the percentage of people who reported 'using British Sign Language at home' o ...

. Regardless, Swedish SL in turn gave rise to

(1823) and

(1850s), the latter with local admixture; Finnish and Swedish Sign are mutually unintelligible. ''

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensi ...

'' reports that

Danish Sign Language Danish Sign Language ( da, Dansk tegnsprog, DTS) is the sign language used in Denmark. Classification Henri Wittmann (1991) Wittmann, Henri (1991). "Classification linguistique des langues signées non vocalement." Revue québécoise de linguist ...

is largely mutually intelligible with Swedish Sign, though Wittmann places DSL in the

French Sign Language family The French Sign Language (LSF, from ''langue des signes française'') or Francosign family is a language family of sign languages which includes French Sign Language and American Sign Language. The LSF family descends from Old French Sign Langua ...

. There are no known dialects in the Swedish Sign Language, however, it is partly intelligible with other manual languages such as Danish (DSL), Norwegian (NSL), and Finnish (FSE). The Finland-Swedish Sign Language, also known as FinSSL, was created by the deaf community of Swedish backgrounds inhabiting the coastal areas of Finland. It is declared as an independent language given the connection to the Finland-Swedish culture.

References

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