Sign Language: Scandinavia

Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are geographically known as Scandinavia. But historically, politically, culturally, and, to some extent, linguistically, Scandinavia also includes Iceland and Finland and territories associated with all these countries. These countries are also often referred to as the Nordic countries. There is significant intelligibility between some of the Scandinavian spoken languages. There is also some intelligibility between the Scandinavian sign languages, possibly because of the political, historical, and cultural relations among the spoken languages. It has also to do with Deaf culture and Deaf education; the language contact between the Scandinavian sign languages has mainly occurred through Deaf education.

Danish Sign Language is not officially recognized as a minority language in Denmark. Deaf signers of Danish Sign Language number about 5,000. The first teacher for the Deaf in Denmark was Peter Atke Castberg, and the first school for Deaf children there was established in 1807. Brita Bergman and Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen assume, from Castberg’s writings, that at least some of the students are likely to have used home signing systems, if not a sign language, before coming to the school. The Faroe Islands and Greenland are parts of the Kingdom of Denmark. Faroese deaf children were educated in Denmark until 1962, and deaf Greenlandic children were sent to Denmark from 1957 until the first deaf school in Greenland was established in 1978. The Deaf signers in the Faroe Islands number between 30 and 50 and in Greenland between 20 and 30. Danish Sign Language is said to have influenced the sign languages of both the Faroe Islands and Greenland. No research has been conducted on the mutual intelligibility of Danish Sign Language and either of the two languages, but some Faroese and Greenlandic signers consider them separate languages.

Norwegian Sign Language is officially recognized as a minority language in the Norwegian government’s white paper from 2007–2008. The Deaf signers of Norwegian Sign Language number between 4,000 and 5,000. The first school for deaf [Page 812]children in Norway was established in 1825 by a Deaf man, Andreas Christian Møller, who had studied in Denmark. In his overview of the history of Norwegian Sign Language, Odd-Inge Schröder assumes that Norwegian Sign Language has three sources: the manual communication between Deaf Norwegians before the establishment of the school, Danish Sign Language through Møller, and Swedish Sign Language through a Swedish Deaf teacher at the school.

Icelandic Sign Language obtained legal status as a minority language in Iceland in 2011. There are about 200 to 250 Deaf signers of Icelandic Sign Language. Iceland was a part of the Kingdom of Denmark until the early 20th century. Until the first school for the Deaf in Iceland was established in 1867, deaf children were sent to Denmark for education. One of those children, Páll Pálsson, later became the first teacher for the Deaf in Iceland. He presumably used signs from Danish Sign Language in the school’s first years, which may have influenced the language emerging in the school setting. Until 1980, all the principals of the Deaf school in Iceland had studied in Denmark, and the teaching methods used in Denmark therefore influenced the methods used to teach deaf children in Iceland. Both Rannveig Sverrisdóttir and Kristin Thorvaldsdóttir’s comparison of color signs in Icelandic Sign Language and Danish Sign Language and Russell Aldersson and Lisa McEntee-Atalianis’s lexical comparison of the two languages show a striking resemblance between the two lexicons.

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