Russian Sign Language
| Russian Sign Language | |
|---|---|
| Русский Язык Жестов Russkiy Yazyk Zhestov Russkij Âzyk Žestov |
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| Native to | Russia and possibly other countries that belonged to the USSR, such as Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Moldova; partly in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania |
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Native speakers
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120,000 in Russia (2010 census) |
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French Sign
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| Dialects |
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | Either: rsl – Russian Sign Language vsi – Moldovan Sign Language |
| Glottolog | russ1270 |
Russian Sign Language is the sign language of the Deaf community in Russia. It has a grammar unlike the (spoken or written) Russian language, with much stricter word order and word formation rules. Russian Sign Language belongs to the French Sign Language family. Vocabulary from Austrian Sign Language also heavily influences Russian Sign Language.
Russian Sign Language (РЖЯ) has its own grammar and is used by Deaf Russians in everyday communication. However, there is a "signed Russian" which is mainly used in official communications, such as sign language lectures at universities, conference papers, and in the past it was used on television in interpreted news programs.
RSL is thought to have started ca. 1806, when a school for the deaf was opened at Pavlovsk near St. Petersburg. It was exported to Bulgaria in 1920, where it has become a separate language (Bulgarian Sign Language) rather than a dialect of Russian Sign Language, though Russian Sign Language is also used there.
The Moscow Bilingual School for the Deaf, which uses Russian Sign Language in classrooms, was opened in 1992.
Much of the early research on Russian Sign Language was done by Galina Lazarevna Zaitseva, who wrote her 1969 PhD thesis on spatial relationships in Russian Sign Language, and in 1992 devised the now standard term for Russian Sign Language "Russkii Zhestovyi Yazyk" (Russian: Русский Жестовый Язык). Ongoing research into the language takes place at the Centre for Deaf Studies in Moscow.
Regional variation of Russian Sign appears to be relatively wide, comparable to the regional variants within Polish Sign Language or Estonian Sign Language, but greater than a more homogeneous ASL. One study reported lexical similarity between two Russian signers of 70–80%, in the same range as between those two signers and signers from Ukraine and Moldova, but due to the limited sample stopped short of drawing any conclusions as to whether they constituted the same or different languages.
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Wikipedia