Sri Lankan Sign Language

Sri Lankan Sign Language (Sinhala: ශ්‍රී ලංකා සංඥා භාෂාව, romanized: Śrī Laṁkā Saṁgnā Bhāṣāva) is a visual language used by deaf people in Sri Lanka and has regional variations stemming from the 25 Deaf schools in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankan Sign Language
Native to	Sri Lanka
Native speakers	unknown number of 13,000 deaf people (1986)[1]
Language family	Deaf-community sign languages
Language codes
ISO 639-3	sqs
Glottolog	sril1237
ELP	Sri Lankan Sign Language

Classification

Wittmann (1991)^[2] posits that the Sri Lankan languages, as a group, are a language isolate ('prototype' sign language), though one developed through stimulus diffusion from an existing sign language. It is not known if they are related to each other, nor how many there are.

References

1. Sri Lankan Sign Language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. Wittmann, Henri (1991). "Classification linguistique des langues signées non vocalement" (PDF). Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée (in French). 10 (1): 215–88. S2CID 162499258.

External links

• Sri Lankan sign language