British Sign Language

Scottish Sign Language, Welsh Sign Language, Northern Ireland Sign Language (BSL-NI, NISL). Deaf community is cohesive so communication is good despite variation in different parts of the United Kingdom (e.g. Scotland, Wales, with more divergence in Northern Ireland, especially among older signers, Parks and Parks 2012). Signing varies along a continuum from something usually called Signed English (which draws on BSL vocabulary but uses grammatical structure like spoken English) to natural BSL. Different styles of signing used in different situations, and signers vary in terms of how much of the range of signing styles they control. Not inherently intelligible to users of American Sign Language (ASL) [ase], although Northern Ireland variety shows significant influence from ASL. Many structural and lexical similarities between British Sign Language (BSL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan) [asf], and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) [nzs] and a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Linguists sometimes use the name BANZSL to refer to them as a group, while still recognizing them as having separate sociolinguistic identities (2003 T. Johnston).