Month: February 2024

Did you know there’s no universal sign language? Each country, like the U.S. with ASL and the U.K. with BSL, has its own. In fact, there are an estimated 300 sign languages that are currently in use worldwide.  

There is ‘International Sign’, which is not a full language but a cross-cultural communication method and is used globally at events like the Deaflympics. While more Western-friendly, it’s not as clear to those from Africa and Asia. Still, it shows how sign languages adapt for shared understanding.

Rotokas, spoken in the mountains of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, boasts one of the world’s smallest phonemic inventories with just 11 phonemes. 

For comparison, English has 44 phonemes. A phoneme is generally regarded as “a set of speech sounds that are seen as equivalent to each other in a given language”. So even if the “k” sounds in the English word “kill” and “skill” are not exactly identical, we see them as equivalent within the language, and that’s why we call it a phoneme.