Abstract:
New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) was made an official language of New Zealand in 2006 and is used by over 20,000 people nationwide. While NZSL thrives as a “spoken” language, it does not have a written form. Recourse is made to either video recording/streaming or a written oral language, primarily English. This paper seeks to provide the New Zealand Deaf community with an alternative – written NZSL. The proposed system is not a means of describing or transcribing NZSL for the purposes of dictionaries or educational texts. It is intended for the purposes of communication in NZSL by means of the written word in the same way that the written forms of oral languages such as English and Maori are used. Previous attempts at creating written forms for sign languages have tended towards a pictorial diagrammatic approach or a linear segmental alphabetic approach based on the linear arrangement of symbols into groups separated by spaces between words. The system proposed here uses as its model a combination of elements found in the writing systems of Korean, Chinese and Japanese. It utilises the structure and featural nature of hangeul with phonetic elements arranged in nominal blocks. Some characters within the system contain a semantic classifier, inspired by the use of these classifiers in the composition of a number of Chinese characters. A number of elements are taken from Japanese including a largely mixed-script system and the use of diacritic marks to indicate variations in the production of signs. This proposal hopes to not only show that the writing systems of China, Korea and Japan can serve as models for the creation of new and effective writing systems, but to also provide NZSL with a written form which may in turn serve as a model for other Sign language writing systems in overseas Deaf communities.
