Maltese Sign Language

Maltese Sign Language
Native to Malta
Native speakers
200 (2014)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 mdl
Glottolog malt1238[2]

Maltese Sign Language (Lingwa tas-Sinjali Maltija, LSM) is a young sign language of Malta. It developed into its modern form circa 1980 with the establishment of the first Deaf club in Malta, and subsequently with its use in education for the deaf. Its prior history is unrecorded, though there are some signs which indicate contact with British Sign Language (Malta was a British colony until 1964). These signs are relatively few, however, and LSM is not part of the BSL family (Brentari 2010).

Maria Galea has described the use of SignWriting when used to write Maltese Sign Language.[3]

References

Notes
  1. Maltese Sign Language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Maltese Sign Language". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. Galea, Maria (2014). SignWriting (SW) of Maltese Sign Language (LSM) and its development into an orthography: Linguistic considerations (Ph.D. dissertation). Malta: University of Malta. Retrieved 4 February 2015.
Bibliography
Maltese Sign Language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, March 05, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.