Arabic is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world. Having emerged in the 1st century, it is named after the Arab people; the term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece.
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.
Sign languages are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages.
International Sign (IS) is a pidgin sign language which is used in a variety of different contexts, particularly as an international auxiliary language at meetings such as the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) congress, in some European Union settings, and at some UN conferences, at events such as the Deaflympics, the Miss & Mister Deaf World, and Eurovision, and informally when travelling and socialising.
The Arab world, formally the Arab homeland, also known as the Arab nation, the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, refers to a vast group of countries, mainly located in Western Asia and Northern Africa. While the majority of people in Arab world are ethnically Arab, there are also significant populations of other ethnic groups such as Berbers, Kurds, Somalis and Nubians, among other groups. Arabic is used as the lingua franca throughout the Arab world.
The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, also known as the Gulf Cooperation Council, is a regional, intergovernmental, political, and economic union comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The council's main headquarters is located in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. The Charter of the GCC was signed on 25 May 1981, formally establishing the institution.
Auslan is the sign language used by the majority of the Australian Deaf community. The term Auslan is a portmanteau of "Australian Sign Language", coined by Trevor Johnston in the 1980s, although the language itself is much older. Auslan is related to British Sign Language (BSL) and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL); the three have descended from the same parent language, and together comprise the BANZSL language family. Auslan has also been influenced by Irish Sign Language (ISL) and more recently has borrowed signs from American Sign Language (ASL).
Egyptian Arabic, locally known as Colloquial Egyptian, or simply Masri (مَصرى), is the most widely spoken vernacular Arabic dialect in Egypt. It is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, and originated in the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt. The ca. 100 million Egyptians speak a continuum of dialects, among which Cairene is the most prominent. It is also understood across most of the Arabic-speaking countries due to broad Egyptian influence in the region, including through Egyptian cinema and Egyptian music. These factors help to make it the most widely spoken and by far the most widely studied variety of Arabic.
Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of varieties of Arabic spoken in Yemen, southwestern Saudi Arabia and the Horn of Africa. It is generally considered a very conservative dialect cluster, having many classical features not found across most of the Arabic-speaking world.
German Sign Language or Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS), is the sign language of the deaf community in Germany, Luxembourg and in the German-speaking community of Belgium. It is unclear how many use German Sign Language as their main language; Gallaudet University estimated 50,000 as of 1986. The language has evolved through use in deaf communities over hundreds of years.
MENA, an acronym in the English language, refers to a grouping of countries situated in and around the Middle East and North Africa. It is also known as WANA, SWANA, or NAWA, which alternatively refers to the Middle East as West Asia, this is another way to reference the geographical region, instead of using the more common political terminology.
Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (IPSL) is the predominant sign language in the subcontinent of South Asia, used by at least 15 million deaf signers. As with many sign languages, it is difficult to estimate numbers with any certainty, as the Census of India does not list sign languages and most studies have focused on the north and urban areas. As of 2021, it is the most used sign language in the world, and Ethnologue ranks it as the 151st most "spoken" language in the world.
Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a village sign language used by about 150 deaf and many hearing members of the al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in the Negev desert of southern Israel.
Hadhrami Arabic, or Ḥaḍrami Arabic (ḤA), is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Hadhrami people (Ḥaḍārima) living in the region of Hadhramaut in southeastern Yemen, western Oman and southern Saudi Arabia. It is also spoken by many emigrants, who migrated from the Hadhramaut in East Africa, Southeast Asia and, recently, to the other Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
The varieties of Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family originating in the Arabian Peninsula, are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of mutual intelligibility that are often related to geographical distance and some that are mutually unintelligible. Many aspects of the variability attested to in these modern variants can be found in the ancient Arabic dialects in the peninsula. Likewise, many of the features that characterize the various modern variants can be attributed to the original settler dialects as well as local native languages and dialects. Some organizations, such as SIL International, consider these approximately 30 different varieties to be separate languages, while others, such as the Library of Congress, consider them all to be dialects of Arabic.
The Arab League has 22 member states. It was founded in Cairo in March 1945 with six members: the Kingdom of Egypt, Kingdom of Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syrian Republic, and Transjordan. North Yemen joined on 5 May 1945. Membership increased during the second half of the 20th century. Seven countries have observer status. The headquarters are located in Cairo, Egypt.
Russian Sign Language (RSL) is the sign language used by the Deaf community in Russia and possibly Belarus and Tajikistan. It belongs to the French Sign Language family.
Egyptian Sign Language is a sign language used by members of the deaf community in Egypt. Although there are no official statistics on the number of deaf people or the number of people who use Egyptian Sign Language as their primary language, Gallaudet University's library resources website quotes a 1999 estimate of 2 million hearing impaired children, while a 2007 study by the World Health Organization places the prevalence of hearing loss in Egypt at 16.02% across all age groups. Egyptian Sign Language is not formally recognized by the government.
The sociolinguistics of sign languages is the application of sociolinguistic principles to the study of sign languages. The study of sociolinguistics in the American Deaf community did not start until the 1960s. Until recently, the study of sign language and sociolinguistics has existed in two separate domains. Nonetheless, now it is clear that many sociolinguistic aspects do not depend on modality and that the combined examination of sociolinguistics and sign language offers countless opportunities to test and understand sociolinguistic theories. The sociolinguistics of sign languages focuses on the study of the relationship between social variables and linguistic variables and their effect on sign languages. The social variables external from language include age, region, social class, ethnicity, and sex. External factors are social by nature and may correlate with the behavior of the linguistic variable. The choices made of internal linguistic variant forms are systematically constrained by a range of factors at both the linguistic and the social levels. The internal variables are linguistic in nature: a sound, a handshape, and a syntactic structure. What makes the sociolinguistics of sign language different from the sociolinguistics of spoken languages is that sign languages have several variables both internal and external to the language that are unique to the Deaf community. Such variables include the audiological status of a signer's parents, age of acquisition, and educational background. There exist perceptions of socioeconomic status and variation of "grassroots" deaf people and middle-class deaf professionals, but this has not been studied in a systematic way. "The sociolinguistic reality of these perceptions has yet to be explored". Many variations in dialects correspond or reflect the values of particular identities of a community.
Cena is a village sign language used by 34 known deaf signers and many more hearing inhabitants of Várzea Queimada, a small, agricultural community in the sertão (scrubland) of Piauí, north-eastern Brazil. It is currently in its third generation of users.
