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British Sign Language - This article is about British Sign Language. BSL is also an abbreviation for Breed-specific legislation.
British sign language (BSL) is the sign language used in the United Kingdom (UK). BSL is the first or preferred language of nearly 70,000 deaf or hearing-impaired people in the UK. It is a language of space and movement using the hands, body, face and head. Many thousands of hearing people also use BSL. Although Great Britain and the United States share English as a spoken language, British Sign Language is distinct from American Sign Language (ASL). BSL fingerspelling is also different from ASL as it uses two hands instead of one. The Makaton system was developed by borrowing signs from British Sign Language. BSL is also distinct from Irish Sign Language (ISL) which is more closely related to French Sign Language and ASL. Both BSL and ISL are used in Northern Ireland. BSL has what could loosely be termed 'accents' or dialects. Signs that are used in Scotland for example, may not always be understood in the South of England, and vice versa. Some signs are even more local, occurring only in certain towns or cities. Likewise, some may go in or out of fashion, or evolve over time, just as terms in spoken languages do. The systems for sign language used in Australia and New Zealand, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language, were based largely on 19th Century BSL, and all retain the same manual alphabet, grammar and similar lexicon. BSL, Auslan and NZSL together may be called BANZSL. There have been campaigns to have BSL recognised on a similar level to Welsh and the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland. Many British television channels broadcast programs with in-vision signing, using BSL, as well as specially made programmes aimed mainly at Deaf people such as the BBC's See Hear and Channel 4's VEE-TV. See also External links
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