South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

, manually coded language is used in education, as a bridge between

South African Sign Language South African Sign Language (SASL, ) is the primary sign language used by deaf people in South Africa. The South African government added a National Language Unit for South African Sign Language in 2001. SASL is not the only manual language use ...

(SASL) and the eleven official oral languages of the country. These codes apply the signs of SASL to the grammar of the oral languages, resulting in

Signed English Manually Coded English (MCE) is an umbrella term referring to a number of invented manual codes intended to visually represent the exact grammar and morphology of spoken English. Different codes of MCE vary in the levels of adherence to spoken ...

, Signed Afrikaans, Signed Xhosa, Signed Zulu, etc. They are not a natural form of communication among deaf people. Manually coded language is commonly used instead of SASL for simultaneous translation from an oral language into sign, for example at the Deaf Forum that is held annually at different locations in the

Western Cape The Western Cape ( ; , ) is a provinces of South Africa, province of South Africa, situated on the south-western coast of the country. It is the List of South African provinces by area, fourth largest of the nine provinces with an area of , an ...

. The result is that, while deaf people from different language communities can communicate with each other without difficulty in SASL, they cannot understand "sign language" interpreters unless they have been schooled in the particular manually coded language used by the interpreter. That is, while they share a common language in SASL, they differ in their understanding of Signed English, Signed Afrikaans, Signed Xhosa, etc., which are not a normal form of communication for anyone. This results in the common misconception among even deaf South Africans that there are various sign languages in the country, when in fact there is only one.Aarons & Reynolds, 2003, "South African Sign Language", in Monaghan, ed., ''Many Ways to be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities'' A very different form of manually coded language is cued speech, an aid to

lipreading Lip reading, also known as speechreading, is a technique of understanding a limited range of speech by visually interpreting the movements of the lips, face and tongue without sound. Estimates of the range of lip reading vary, with some figures as ...

which has been developed for Afrikaans, South African English, and Setswana.

References

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