French Sign Language (Langue des Signes Français or LSF) is the language of the deaf in the nation of France. According to Ethnologue, it has 50,000 to 100,000 native speakers.

Among all signed languages, American Sign Language is most closely related to French Sign Language.

History

French sign language is frequently associated with the work of Charles Michel de l'Épée (l'abbé de l'Épée). He is said to have discovered sign language by total accident, having ducked into a nearby house to escape the rain, he fell upon a pair of twin sisters, deaf, and was struck by the richness and complexity of the language that they used to communicate among themselves and the deaf Parisian community. The abbé set himself to learning the language and eventually forming a free school for the deaf. At this school, he developed a system he called "methodical signs", to teach his students how to read and write. The abbé was eventually able to make public demonstrations (1771 to 1774) of his system, demonstrations that attracted educators and celebrities from all over the continent and that popularised the idea the deaf could be educated, especially by gesture.

The methodical signs he created were a mixture of sign language words he had learned with some grammatical terms he invented. The resulting combination, an artificial language, was over-complicated and completely unusable by his students. For example, where his system would elaborately construct the word "unintelligible" with a chain of 5 signs ("interior-understand-possible-adjective-not"), the deaf natural language would simply say "understand-impossible". LSF was not invented by the abbé. Instead his major contributions to the deaf community were recognising that the deaf did not need spoken language to be able to think, and indirectly accelerating the natural growth of the language by simple virtue of putting so many deaf students under a single roof.

French sign language flourished from this point until the late 1800s at which point a schism between the manualist and oralist schools of thought had long developed. In 1880 the Milan International Congress of Teachers for the Deaf-Mute convened and decided that the oralist tradition would be preferred. In due time, the use of sign language was treated as a barrier to learning to talk, and thus forbidden from the classroom.

This situation would remain in France until the late 1970s where the deaf community began to militate for greater recognition of sign language and for a bilingual education system. It would not be until 1991 that the General Assembly passed the Fabius law, officially authorising the use of LSF for the education of deaf children. A law was also passed in 2004 fully recognising LSF as a language in its own right.

See also

• Ethnologue entry on LSF (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=FSL)
• A site by students of Paris University 8 (http://ufr6.univ-paris8.fr/desshandi/supl/projets/site_lsf)
• The LSF wikibook (http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/LSF) (in French)