Hong Kong Sign Language (), abbreviated as HKSL, is the deaf sign language of
Hong Kong
Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...
and
Macau
Macau or Macao is a special administrative regions of China, special administrative region of the People's Republic of China (PRC). With a population of about people and a land area of , it is the most List of countries and dependencies by p ...
. It derived from the southern dialect of
Chinese Sign Language, but is now an independent, mutually unintelligible language.
Origins
The origin of HKSL can be traced back to around 1949, when a group of around 20 deaf people moved from Shanghai and Nanjing to Hong Kong and began tutoring the local deaf community to facilitate greater social cohesion and standardisation of their sign language(s). Chinese sign language was the initial medium of instruction, leading to the circulation of CSL among the local deaf community, who adapted the language by developing their own signs with new ideas, concepts or things they encounter in their lives. This led to a further development of the vocabulary and intricacies of Hong Kong Sign Language as separate from CSL.
For a number of years, HKSL continued to develop with little external influence, as international travel from Hong Kong and thus interaction between other deaf communities was not always feasible.
With more and more Hong Kong deaf people travelling abroad in recent decades for a variety of reasons, borrowings into HKSL have become more common. The
American manual alphabet was borrowed and adopted (with some adaptations) in this way, as were many other signs.
[Hong Kong Sign Language (Elementary),(2005). Eds. Chan Yuk-Kuen, Lai Wing-sze, Siu Wai-yan Rebecca. Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Society for the Deaf.]
Grammar and vocabulary
There are 40 to 50 basic hand-shapes in Hong Kong sign language. Signs are generally derived from conceptual representation (abstract, such as the signs for 'father' and 'mother'), visual representation (direct, such as the signs for 'to separate' and 'thick-skinned') or representation of the
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only on ...
(such as with the signs for 'to introduce' and 'the Chinese language') or, rarely, the
English term (such as with the sign for 'toilet/WC'). Question words are generally phrase or sentence-final, while the basic
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...
is S-O-V. The subject and object may be omitted in conversation between two people where they are clear from context.
Sometimes, signers may speak or mouth the word while signing. For example, when signing the name of a place like
Central, the signer may mouth the Cantonese name for "Central" while signing. This practice may be related to the signers' past training in speech and lip-reading, but sometimes mouthing bears no relation to the spoken language, and is an inherent part of the sign.
HKSL is interesting among sign languages in that it is entirely ambidextrous.
References
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See also
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Languages of Hong Kong
During the British Hong Kong, British colonial era, English was the sole official language until 1978. Today, the Hong Kong Basic Law, Basic Law of Hong Kong states that English_language, English and Chinese_language, Chinese are the two offic ...
External links
Chinese Sign Language: by Elizabeth T. Yeh, 10/28/04Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Chinese University of Hong KongHong Kong Sign Language BrowserHong Kong Sign Language AssociationHong Kong Society for the DeafSilenceThen & Now: Sign Language in Hong Kong by Jason WordieSign Bilingualism and Deaf Education in Hong Kong
ChineseELAR archive of Preliminary Documentation of Macau Sign Language
{{sign language navigation
Sign languages of China
Languages of Hong Kong
Languages of Macau
Endangered languages of China