Guatemalan Sign Language

Guatemalan Sign Language or Lensegua (Spanish: Lengua de señas guatemalteco) is the proposed national deaf sign language of Guatemala, formerly equated by most users and most literature equates with the sign language known by the acronymic abbreviations LENSEGUA, Lensegua, and LenSeGua. Recent legal initiatives have sought to define the term more inclusively, so that it encompasses all the distinctive sign languages and sign systems native to the country.

The first dictionary for LENSEGUA was published in 2000, and privileges the eastern dialect used largely in and around Guatemala City and by non-indigenous Ladino and mestizo populations in the eastern part of the country.^[2] A second dialect is "spoken" in the western part of the country, especially by non-Indigenous mestizo and Ladino populations in and around the country's second largest city, Quetzaltenango, located in the western highlands. The eastern and western dialects are mutually intelligible for the most part, although they employ slightly different signed-alphabets, lexicons, and, to a lesser extent, grammatical forms. In her still-unpublished 2015 doctoral dissertation Linguistic anthropologist Monica Rodríguez noted that there exists some competition between the two dialects. The competition is based not only on loyalty to local variants, but also mutual suspicion that exogenous influences in other dialects are excessive. The presumption is that the different LENSEGUA dialects evidence formative influence from other sign languages, such as Old Costa Rican Sign Language and American Sign Language (ASL), not to mention indigenous substrate sign languages of the region.

LENSEGUA is distinct from the sign languages used in Mexico and other neighboring Spanish speaking countries. Lensegua is also distinct from the sign languages used by Indigenous populations of Guatemala and neighboring countries, such as those belonging to the family of related sign languages used by Mayas in the Yucatán Peninsula, Chiapas, and Guatemala, respectively, which have come to be known collectively by the misnomer Mayan sign languages, even though none of the sign languages actually belongs to Mayan language family. A notable difference between LENSEGUA and indigenous sign languages of the region is that LENSEGUA has a manual alphabet and makes use of initialized signs and finger-spellings.

For Deaf education, a number of schools, organizations, and service programs in Guatemala not only teach LENSEGUA, but use it their primary language for instruction. Although LENSEGUA holds no official status, municipal and departmental governments have largely allowed language promoters to teach basic lessons on and about LENSEGUA to hearing children in primary and secondary schools across the country, even in indigenous communities, where other indigenous sign languages might be used.