International sign: a practitioner's perspective
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International Sign, the international communication used among deaf people, has been in use for at least the past 150 years. It has gone by various names throughout history: universal sign language, international gestures, Gestuno, or International Sign. But what is it, exactly? Today, of course, we know that each deaf community has its own sign language, and those languages are more or less mutually incomprehensible (depending on their historical relations). Then how do we explain the fact that signers fluent in at least one sign language can manage to communicate with signers in a completely different and mutually unintelligible sign language? Is International Sign a language? Is it even international? Where did it come from? When did it appear? How does it work?
With the rapid increase in the number of international conferences such as the recent Deaf Way II festival and the World Symposium of Sign Language Interpreters this year in Washington, and the XIV World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf next year in Montreal, interest in International Sign in the US is growing. Now with over 20 years of research on international communication among sign languages, it is time to take another look at what we know about International Sign: its history, its use, and what we as interpreters can learn from it.