French Sign Language (langue des signes française or LSF) is the sign language of the deaf in the nation of France. According to Ethnologue, it has 50,000 to 100,000 native signers.
French Sign Language is related and partially ancestral to Dutch Sign Language (NGT), German Sign Language (DGS), Flemish Sign Language (VGT), Belgian-French Sign Language (LSFB), Irish Sign Language (ISL), American Sign Language (ASL), Quebec Sign Language (LSQ), and Russian Sign Language (RSL).
Read more about French Sign Language: History
Famous quotes containing the words french, sign and/or language:
“The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn’t a sign that they “don’t understand” one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.”
—Helen Rowland (1875–1950)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)