Polish Sign Language (, ) is the language of the

deaf community Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

. Polish Sign Language uses a distinctive one-handed manual alphabet based on the alphabet used in

Old French Sign Language Old French Sign Language (, often abbreviated as VLSF) was the language of the deaf community in 18th-century Paris at the time of the establishment of the first deaf schools. The earliest records of the language are in the work of the Abbé d ...

and therefore appears to be related to

French Sign Language French Sign Language (, LSF) is the sign language of deaf and hard-of-hearing people in France and in French-speaking parts of Switzerland. According to ''Ethnologue'', it has 100,000 native signers. French Sign Language is related and part ...

. It may also have common features with Russian Sign Language and

German Sign Language German Sign Language (, DGS) is the sign language of the deaf community in Germany, Luxembourg and in the German-speaking community of Belgium. It is unclear how many use German Sign Language as their main language; Gallaudet University estimate ...

, which is related to the history of Poland during the Partitions, when

Russification Russification (), Russianisation or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians adopt Russian culture and Russian language either voluntarily or as a result of a deliberate state policy. Russification was at times ...

and

Germanization Germanisation, or Germanization, is the spread of the German language, German people, people, and German culture, culture. It was a central idea of German conservative thought in the 19th and the 20th centuries, when conservatism and ethnic nati ...

influenced the

Polish language Polish (, , or simply , ) is a West Slavic languages, West Slavic language of the Lechitic languages, Lechitic subgroup, within the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family, and is written in the Latin script. It is primarily spo ...

, and may also have borrowings from the sign language used in the Austrian partition. Its

lexicon A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...

and

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

are distinct from the

, although there is a manually coded version of Polish known as (, or Signed Polish), which is often used by interpreters on television and by teachers in schools. Polish Sign Language was first formed/became prevalent around 1817. Around that time, th
Instytut Głuchoniemych
(Institute for the Deaf-Mute) was founded by Jakub Falkowski, who began teaching deaf children after meeting a deaf boy by the name of Piotr Gąsowski. In 1879, its first dictionary was published by Józef Hollak and Teofil Jagodziński, titled "Słownik mimiczny dla głuchoniemych i osób z nimi styczność mających" ("The Mimic Dictionary for the Deaf-Mute and Persons Having Contact with Them"). In 2012, under the "Sign Language Act", the language received official status in Poland and can be chosen as the language of instruction by those who require it.

References

Scholarly literature

*Piotr Fabian and Jarosław Francik. "Synthesis and presentation of the Polish sign language gestures." 1st International Conf. on Applied Mathematics and Informatics at Universities. 2001. *Farris, M. A. Sign language research and Polish sign language. ''Lingua Posnaniensis'' 36 (1994): 13–36. *Mariusz Oszust and Marian Wysocki. Polish sign language words recognition with Kinect. Human System Interaction (HSI), 2013 The 6th International Conference on. IEEE, 2013. *Włodarczak, Aleksandra, Agnieszka Kossowska, and Małgorzata Haładewiczygrzelak. "Understanding Loans from Standard Polish into the Polish Sign Language." ''Communication as a Life Process'', Volume Two: ''The Holistic Paradigm in Language Sciences'' (2019): 73ff. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

External links

*
Polish manual alphabet
**(imag
here

official website *
History of Polish Sign Language
Languages of Poland Sign languages Unclassified languages of Europe {{sign-lang-stub