For reasons so complex they would bore even the most stoic and dedicated Sign Language student to tears, I have been steeped in the lives of Sign Language users for whom ASL is a distant second Sign Language or even the third or fourth language they have used in their lives.
This got me thinking about the joys and benefits of surrounding yourself with Sign Languages from other countries.
You never really understand a concept until you see how that idea is presented in a language foreign to you. It will almost always change your perspective on how you have used a term (perhaps differently or even wholly inaccurately to the meaning as you now see it) or can be a little mind blowing regarding how differently two cultures integrate (or don’t) an idea you felt was “universal”.
There are some commonalities of course, I mean how many Signs for “drink” could there be? But there are vast differences in myriad areas of thought when meaning is applied to a cultural matrix.
If you want a good place to start this journey try comparing various Sign Language lexicons regarding gender as they are produced in different countries and regions globally, including ASL. These are will tell you a great deal about the history of gender role stereotypes worldwide. They seem to act as a kind of time capsule for how gender has been viewed through a lens of cultural history, but, be prepared in some cases, you may not to like what you find.
In the end I encourage everyone to experience fluent Sign Language from a country other than your own, if for no other reason than to realize how strikingly similar and vastly different we each are when we look out from what David Foster Wallace called our “skull sized kingdoms.”
One time I was in the Augsburg Hauptbahnhof and I spotted a group of Deaf Germans in the bar. They ranged in age from their 20’s to… well over their 20’s. It took the group of us about 20 minutes to come up with a “Trade Language” moving between German Sign Language and ASL (it helped that I had some experience with German Sign Language from my days with the National Theatre of the Deaf).
My Dad called me when it was time to board the train and asked “was that hard?”
Yes!
“Is it because German Sign Language is that different from ASL?”
No. It’s because they are drunk.
Drunk is drunk.
Drunk is drunk in any language.