Native speakers 40,000 (2013) | Glottolog ital1288 | |
Region Italy, San Marino, Switzerland Language family French sign
Italian Sign Language ISO 639-3 ise – inclusive code
Individual code:
slf – Swiss-Italian SL | ||
Italian Sign Language or LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana) is the visual language employed by deaf people in Italy. Deep analysis of it began in the 1980s, along the lines of William Stokoe's research on American Sign Language in the 1960s. Until recently, most of the studies about Italian Sign Language have dealt with its phonology and vocabulary. According to the European Union for the Deaf, the majority of the 60,000–90,000 Deaf use LIS.
Structure
Like many sign languages, LIS is in some ways different from its "spoken neighbour"; thus, it has little in common with spoken Italian, but shares some features with non-Indo-European oral languages (e.g. it is verb final, like the Basque language; it has inclusive and exclusive pronominal forms like oceanic languages; interrogative particles are verb final (You go where?).
A sign variety of spoken Italian also exists, the so-called Signed Italian which combines LIS lexicon with the grammar of spoken Italian: this is not Italian Sign Language, however.
Some features of LIS are typical of sign languages in general, e.g. agreement between nouns, adjectives and verbs is not based on gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) but it is based on place, that is the spatial position in which the sign is performed: nouns can be placed everywhere in the space but their position must be consistent with that of pronouns and verbs. The LIS translation of the sentence "The child speaks to the mother" appears as Child-here mother-there this-speak-that, rather than involving forms like "he, she". The voice intonation is replaced by facial expressions which mark interrogative sentences, imperatives and relative clauses. Other features of Italian Sign Language which can be found also in oral languages are: classifiers; dual, trial, quattrial and even quinquial forms in addition to the general plural; verbs inflected for person.