Signed Nepali or Sign-Supported Nepali, is a means of communication often used by (nominally) signing hearing individuals in their interactions with signing deaf, or by deaf persons who for whatever reason acquired Nepali as their mother tongue and then acquired

Nepali Sign Language Nepalese Sign Language or Nepali Sign Language is the main sign language of Nepal. It is a partially Language standardization, standardized language based informally on the variety used in Kathmandu, with some input from varieties from Pokhara an ...

subsequently, or by deaf persons with people with normal hearing whose signing is judged not to be fully fluent (i.e. not

). Signed Nepali is a

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

form of Nepali Sign Language commonly used by people with normal hearing who (nominally) sign in their interactions with deaf people. It is also commonly used by those deaf persons who acquired Nepali Sign Language later in life and for whom Nepali is their first language (L1) and Nepali Sign Language is a second language (L2). Although schools for the deaf in Nepal theoretically use Nepali Sign Language as their medium of instruction (alongside written Nepali), in practice and in fact, the majority of classes are conducted in some version of Sign-Supported Nepali, as a Simultaneous Communication (or so-called Total Communication) approach is widely practiced. (Such practices have been documented by Hoffmann-Dilloway (2008).Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway (2008). "Metasemiotic Regimentation in the Standardization of Nepali Sign Language." ''

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, ...

'', 18/2: 192-213. Although the deaf themselves, as articulated by representative organizations such as the National Deaf Federation Nepal and

Kathmandu Association of the Deaf Kathmandu Association of the Deaf (KAD) is a non-governmental organization representing the deaf of Kathmandu, and is a member association of the National Federation of the Deaf Nepal. It is the first such association to be established, and in fact ...

, value natural sign language (i.e.

) most highly, teachers at schools for the deaf (including sometimes teachers who are themselves deaf) tend to value only signing which follow the grammar of Nepali, i.e. Sign-Supported Nepali. Generally speaking, Signed Nepali is neither Nepali nor

, but rather a compromise between the two, using the lexicon of the latter (but little or none of its grammar), and the word order (and some, but in practice rarely very much, of the grammar) of the former. As such, it is less than a full language, lacking in both

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

and

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

, and thus generally tends to be not fully comprehensible to the majority of deaf signers. In this, it is similar to other

manually coded language Manually coded languages (MCLs) are a family of gestural communication methods which include gestural spelling as well as constructed languages which directly interpolate the grammar and syntax of oral languages in a gestural-visual form—that ...

s, such as various versions of

Signed English Manually-Coded English (MCE) is a type of sign system that follows direct spoken English. The different codes of MCE vary in the levels of directness in following spoken English grammar. There may also be a combination with other visual clues, suc ...

References

Nepali Nepali language {{IndoAryan-lang-stub