List of sign languages

There are perhaps two hundred sign languages in use around the world today. The number is not known with any confidence; new sign languages emerge frequently through creolization and de novo (and occasionally through language planning). In some countries, such as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, each school for the deaf may have a separate language, known only to its students and sometimes denied by the school; on the other hand, countries may share sign languages, though sometimes under different names (Croatian and Serbian, Indian and Pakistani). Deaf sign languages also arise outside of educational institutions, especially in village communities with high levels of congenital deafness, but there are significant sign languages developed for the hearing as well, such as the speech-taboo languages used in aboriginal Australia. Scholars are doing field surveys to identify the world's sign languages.

The following list is grouped into three sections:
 * Deaf sign languages, which are the preferred languages of Deaf communities around the world; these include village sign languages, shared with the hearing community, and Deaf-community sign languages
 * Auxiliary sign languages, which are not native languages, but are signed language systems of varying complexity, used in addition to oral languages. Simple gestures are not included, as they do not constitute language.
 * Signed modes of oral languages, also known as manually coded languages, which are bridges between sign and oral languages

The list of deaf sign languages is sorted regionally and alphabetically, and such groupings should not be taken to imply any genetic relationships between these languages (see List of language families).

Africa
There are at least 25 sign languages in Africa, according to researcher Nobutaka Kamei. Some have distributions that are completely independent of those of African oral languages. At least 13 foreign sign languages, mainly from Europe and America, have been introduced to at least 27 African nations; some of the 23 sign languages documented by Kamei have originated with or been influenced by them.

Deaf sign languages - Historical

 * Martha's Vineyard Sign Language
 * Old French Sign Language – possibly ancestral to the French family
 * Old Kent Sign Language

Auxiliary sign languages

 * Australian Aboriginal sign languages (Warlpiri Sign Language, Yolngu Sign Language, etc)
 * Baby Sign – using signs to assist early language development in young children.
 * Baseball Sign – a method used in baseball and softball to communicate strategic plays without the opponent knowing
 * Contact Sign – a pidgin or contact language between an oral language and a sign language, e.g. Pidgin Sign English (PSE).
 * Curwin Hand Signs – a technique which allows musical notes to be communicated through hand signs.
 * International Sign (previously known as Gestuno) – an auxiliary language used by deaf people in international settings.
 * Makaton – a system of signed communication used by and with people who have speech, language or learning difficulties.
 * Military hand and arm signals – a standardised system of communicating commands and information silently.
 * Monastic sign language
 * Mudra – word-like gestures and poses uses in Hindu and Buddhist dance drama and religious iconography
 * Plains Indian Sign Language
 * Plateau Sign Language
 * Tic tac – a traditional British system of communicating betting odds at racecourses.

Signed modes of oral languages

 * For a more extensive list see Manually Coded Language. This page lists only those MCLs with pages on Wikipedia.


 * General
 * Cued Speech – a hand/mouth system (HMS) to render oral language phonemes visually intelligible.
 * Fingerspelling – alphabetic signs to represent the written form of an oral language.
 * English
 * Manually Coded English
 * Signing Exact English (SEE2)
 * Malay
 * Bahasa Malaysia Kod Tangan (BMKT)
 * Speech-taboo languages
 * Caucasian Sign Language
 * Warlpiri Sign Language
 * Yolŋu Sign Language

Genetic classification of sign languages
Languages are assigned families (implying a genetic relationships between these languages) as British, Swedish (perhaps a branch of BSL), French (with branches ASL (American), Austro-Hungarian, Danish, Italian), German, Japanese, and language isolates.