This article is based in an essay I wrote for an English class in the second semester of 2015

The first time I heard somebody was studying Deaf Sign Language was from my auntie. It seems that the city is giving free classes to learn the Colombian Deaf Sign Language. But what is a Deaf Sign Language?.

Before searching a little in Internet, I thought that the Deaf Sign Language was a language constructed mapping words from a Hearing Language, like Spanish, to hand gestures. This means, I thought, they only use a different set of skills to carry the words they are making, just like writing requires a different set of skills to what speaking requires, thus using the same Spanish grammar as I use. So, basically, if you want to learn Sign Language, I thought, you only need to learn to write or speak again using a different set of skills, with your hands mainly.

That sounds right, but it isn’t, I was completely WRONG!.

Actually a Deaf Sign Language (DSL) is a completely, usually, unrelated language to the language the hearing people speak in the same region. I was really surprised to know that there isn’t the “Spanish” DSL but there is a Colombian DSL, a Mexican DSL, a Spanish DSL

In my mind I had the idea that every deaf person who lives in a country in which Spanish is the lingua franca should speak the Spanish deaf version of the language with their hands, but it is a foolish thought. Yes, ‘we’ were conquered by Spain some hundred years ago, and yes, ‘we’ (my ancestors) were forced to speak Spanish over whatever language they spoke, and yes, that is the reason why we speak Spanish, and that why so many people speak Spanish in a so big and sparse place that is Latin America. But none of that counts for the DSL, because presumably the conquers didn’t speak any sign language or the language was never transmitted or forced on the people.

Actually the Spanish (from Spain) DSL has its own roots in the French Sign Language from the mid-19th century, too late to be carried by the conquers to the “new” world. And also, there is not as much deaf people as there is hearing people, it is difficult to pass a DSL from one speaker to another, it is difficult to learn/teach any language if the interested people are spread all over a region in a low density.

In this sense, spoken/written Spanish and the CSL (Colombian Sign Language), or the whatever other sign language that is used in a region where is Spanish is spoken, are not necessarily related. Of course, languages borrow words from each other, and sign languages are no exception, but Sign Languages are not created by individuals, hearing people for example, and then learn by deaf, they are just like any other language, they develop from human interaction.

Languages are developed by the people who use them and in the case of the CSL are the Colombian deaf community who developed it, or in the case of the Spanish Sign Language (SSL) are the Spanish deaf community who developed it, etc. This means, SSL and CSL are probably unintelligible because they were not developed from the same people. This does not mean that all sign languages totally unrelated between each other either, some of them make groups of languages and thus belong to the same family, just like Spanish, French, and Italian belong to the same family.

Summarizing, the deaf sign languages are just like regular hearing languages, they have their own set of rules for the grammar, spelling (though, many borrow the spelling from a hearing language to reference places or people, a process called fingerspelling), vocabulary, and they shape or are shaped by the people who use them. And because the deaf population from a region tend not to interact with deaf people from other regions, the languages use to develop independently.

My auntie sing up to learn the CSL because she thought learning a deaf language was an easy task, something which could distract her from the daily stress of work and family, and it also could be fun. But as you, dear reader, could guess, what she have though to be an easy task result in an enormous one. She is learning a new foreign language!, and that requires her giving a lot of her energy into learn a new grammar, vocabulary, and hand-body skills. She did not know it at the beginning for sure, but she knows it now, and now she replies that the administration is losing money with her, because she thinks, she is a bad languages learner.