Latvian Sign Language ( lv, latviešu zīmju valoda) is a
sign language
Sign languages (also known as signed 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 ...
commonly used by deaf people in
Latvia
Latvia ( or ; lv, Latvija ; ltg, Latveja; liv, Leţmō), officially the Republic of Latvia ( lv, Latvijas Republika, links=no, ltg, Latvejas Republika, links=no, liv, Leţmō Vabāmō, links=no), is a country in the Baltic region of ...
. Linguists use LSL as an acronym for Latvian Sign Language.
Policy and education
The
Official Language Law of 9 December 1999, which came into force on 1 September 2000, gave Latvian Sign Language a legal status in Section 3.3, which stipulates: 'The State shall ensure the development and use of the Latvian sign language for communication with people with impaired hearing.' Since 2008, Latvia has been screening newborns for hearing impairment.
The majority of Latvian DHI (deaf and hearing impaired) children live in
boarding school
A boarding school is a school where pupils live within premises while being given formal instruction. The word "boarding" is used in the sense of " room and board", i.e. lodging and meals. As they have existed for many centuries, and now exte ...
s instead of with their families.
The country has two specialist schools for DHI children that offer elementary education over a period of 10 or 12 years, one of which uses LSL and signed Latvian in instruction, while the other uses spoken language.
In both schools, children primarily communicate amongst themselves in sign language.
Aside from the two specialist schools, some schools exist which provide separate classes for DHI children, while in the remaining schools DHI children learn alongside their peers with normal hearing.
Research
Latvian Sign Language is claimed to have separated from
French Sign Language
French Sign Language (french: langue des signes française, LSF) is the sign language of the deaf in France and French-speaking parts of Switzerland. According to ''Ethnologue'', it has 100,000 native signers.
French Sign Language is relate ...
some time around 1806.
Mahoney (2017) conducted the first-known
100-word Swadesh–Woodward list comparison of Latvian Sign Language and
Estonian Sign Language (EVK), concluding that a possible relationship between them – as descending from
VLFS, perhaps via
ÖGS and/or
RSL, as Wittmann (1991) and Bickford (2005) proposed – was 'still uncertain as it is unclear how sign languages disseminated in Eastern European countries during the Soviet Union, but aside from superficial impressions that the core lexicons are similar, signs with shared parameters displaying small variation in handshape while retaining 4 selected fingers suggests that these languages share a parent'. She added that '
present there is no reason to assume that Estonian and Latvian sign language have a mother-daughter relationship'.
Power et al. (2020) conducted a large-scale data study into the evolution and contemporary character of 76 of
manual alphabets (MAs) of sign languages, concluding that Latvian Sign Language's manual alphabet showed characteristics that were both typical of a postulated 'Russian Group' (including Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Estonian Sign Language) as well as a postulated 'Polish Group' (including Polish and Lithuanian Sign Language), and was therefore placed in between.
References
External links
Sign language centre of Latvian Association of the Deaf
Dictionary
{{sign language navigation
French Sign Language family
Languages of Latvia