Arab sign-language family

Arab sign language
Geographic
distribution
Mideast, North Africa
Linguistic classificationOne of the world's sign language families
Subdivisions
Language codes
Glottologarab1398

The Arab sign-language family is a family of sign languages spread across the Arab Middle East. Its extent is not yet known, because only some of the sign languages in the region have been compared.[1]

A language planning project for a single Arabic Sign Language is being conducted by the Council of Arab Ministers of Social Affairs (CAMSA), with much of the vocabulary voted on by regional Deaf associations.[1][2] However, so far only a dictionary has been compiled; grammar has not been addressed, so the result cannot be considered a language.[3]

  1. ^ a b Al-Fityani, Kinda; Padden, Carol (2010). "Sign Language Geography in the Arab World" (PDF). University of Haifa. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-07-31.
  2. ^ Adam, Robert (2015). "Standardization of Sign Languages". Sign Language Studies. 15 (4): 432–445. doi:10.1353/sls.2015.0015. JSTOR 26190997. S2CID 145518387.
  3. ^ Al-Fityani, Kinda (2010). Deaf people, modernity, and a contentious effort to unify Arab sign languages (Thesis).