Talk:Norwegian Sign Language

Madagascar

Is Norwegian sign language used in Madagascar? Jon Harald Søby 15:35, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Apparently, no. Logically, has to be deleted. --62.84.15.238 20:13, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Apparently and surprisingly, yes! Cf. [1]: "This explains the apparent oddity of finding, as just one example out of many, Norwegian Sign Language used by some Deaf people in Madagascar.". The Ethnologue isn't always most precise when it comes to sign languages. I have therefore restored the deletion (I hope you don't mind). --Jadriaen 21:42, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

It would still be nice to have citiation. [anon.]

I am really not sure about Madagascar SL being the same as Norwegian SL. When a deaf person from Madagascar meets a deaf person from Norway they usually use International Sign to communicate, and not NSL nor MSL. Even though the first teachers in deaf schools in Madagascar (around 1950) were Norwegians, they could not introduce the NSL vocabularies without modifications, and they had to adapt those vocabularies to the culture, values and reality in Madagascar. After that, the MZC has developed inside the malagasy deaf society to become more and more different from NSL.Keverguen (talk) 12:38, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

The languages are certainly not identical: [2]. This became obvious when I started to try a sign-by-sign comparison of their freely available online dictionaries, but I know original research is a no-no. At the link above, a linguist studying Malagasy Sign Language weighs in. The two have some signs in common, but then, so do many apparently unrelated sign languages, because many signs start out as imitative of the thing they represent to one degree or another (i.e. they originate as a sort of onomatopoeia). There has probably been some influence due to Norwegian Lutherans operating schools for the deaf, and while it's not clear how extensive that is, they're definitely two different languages. Kvadrate (talk) 22:54, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Most info on sign languages, even from Gallaudet U, is really really bad. ASL is generally claimed to derive from FSL, for example. But Clerc reports that he gave up trying to teach his students FSL, and ended up learning their signs instead. So ASL really seems to be an indigenous language with a huge stock of FSL vocab – rather like English with its massive French influence. Given that history, I wouldn't be surprised if Malagasy SL is a similar case with Norwegian SL influence, but who knows, it could simply be NSL with some local words. It's unlikely we're going to get accurate info on such things unless there's a linguistic study to check up on it, and SL linguistics is still quite primitive. — kwami (talk) 23:00, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

"Speakers" in the information box

I noticed that the information box for the article shows that there are 15,000 "Native speakers" of Norwegian Sign Language... Is it possible to get this updated to say "Users" or something that doesn't seem slightly insensitive?

File:Norwegian Sign Language InfoBox.png

— Preceding unsigned comment added by ItsPugle (talk • contribs) 00:22, 17 February 2018 (UTC)