French Sign Language
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{{language
|name=French Sign Language
|image=[[Image:LSF.JPG|center|80px]]
|caption=LSF in French [[manual alphabet]]
|nativename=LSF, ''langue des signes française''
|fam1=[[Old French Sign Language]]
|states=[[France]]
|signers=estimated 80,000–300,000
|iso2=sgn-FR|iso3=fsl}}
'''French Sign Language''' (langue des signes française or '''LSF''') is the [[sign language]] of the [[deaf]] in the nation of [[France]]. According to [[Ethnologue]], it has 50,000 to 100,000 native signers.
French Sign Language is related to [[Dutch Sign Language]] (NGT), [[German Sign Language]] (DGS), [[Flemish Sign Language]] (VGT), [[Belgian-French Sign Language]] (LSFB) [[Irish Sign Language]] (ISL), [[American Sign Language]] (ASL), and [[Quebec Sign Language]] (LSQ).
== History ==
French Sign Language is frequently, though mistakenly, attributed to the work of [[Charles Michel de l'Épée]] (l'abbé de l'Épée). In fact, he is said to have discovered the already existing language by total accident; having ducked into a nearby house to escape the rain, he fell upon a pair of twin sisters, deaf, and was struck by the richness and complexity of the language that they used to communicate among themselves and the deaf Parisian community. The abbé set himself to learning the language, now known as [[Old French Sign Language]], and eventually he established a free school for the deaf. At this school, he developed a system he called "methodical signs", to teach his students how to read and write. The abbé was eventually able to make public demonstrations (1771 to 1774) of his system, demonstrations that attracted educators and celebrities from all over the continent and that popularised the idea that the deaf could be educated, especially by gesture.
The methodical signs he created were a mixture of sign language words he had learned with some grammatical terms he invented. The resulting combination, an artificial language, was over-complicated and completely unusable by his students. For example, where his system would elaborately construct the word "unintelligible" with a chain of 5 signs ("interior-understand-possible-adjective-not"), the deaf natural language would simply say "understand-impossible". LSF was not invented by the abbé, but his major contributions to the deaf community were to recognize that the deaf did not need spoken language to be able to think, and to indirectly accelerate the natural growth of the language by virtue of putting so many deaf students under a single roof.
French Sign Language flourished from this point until the late 1800s at which point a schism between the [[Deaf#Education of the deaf|manualist and oralist]] schools of thought had long developed. In 1880 the Milan International Congress of Teachers for the Deaf-Mute convened and decided that the oralist tradition would be preferred. In due time, the use of sign language was treated as a barrier to learning to talk, and thus forbidden from the classroom.
This situation remained unchanged in France until the late 1970s, when the deaf community began to militate for greater recognition of sign language and for a bilingual education system. In 1991 the National Assembly passed the Fabius law, officially authorising the use of LSF for the education of deaf children. A law was passed in 2004 fully [[Recognition of sign languages|recognising LSF]] as a language in its own right.
===Alphabet===
The [[French manual alphabet]] is used both to distinguish signs of FSL and to incorporate French words while signing.
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==Grammar==
Free word order?
Classifiers?
==Other signed languages==
Relationship with ASL
Use in Canada?
Belgian sign language? (Does not exist: Belgium has VGT and LSFB.)
-->
== See also ==
* [[Old French Sign Language]]
== External links ==
* [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=fsl Ethnologue entry on LSF]
* [http://ufr6.univ-paris8.fr/desshandi/supl/projets/site_lsf LSF sur le Web] - A site by students of Paris University (in French) which contains videos of many individual signs
* [http://www.wiksign.org Wiksign, Wiki LSF Dictionary]
* [http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/LSF The LSF wikibook] (in French)
* [http://www.websourd.org/ WebSourd - site in French and LSF]
* [http://cis.gouv.fr/ General informations on LSF and Deaf community]
[[Category:Sign languages]]
[[Category:Languages of France]]
[[de:Langue des Signes Française]]
[[eo:Franca mansigna lingvo]]
[[fr:Langue des signes française]]
[[ja:フランス手話]]