International Sign

International Sign (IS) (also Gestuno, International Sign Language (ISL) and International Gesture (IG)) is an international auxiliary language sometimes used by deaf people at global forums such as the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), international events such as the Deaflympic games, and informally when travelling and socialising. It can be seen as a kind of pidgin sign language.

History
The need for an international sign system was discussed at the first World Deaf Congress in 1951, when the WFD was formed. In the following years, a pidgin began to emerge as the delegates from different language backgrounds communicated with each other, and in 1973, a WFD committee ("the Commission of Unification of Signs") published a standardized vocabulary. They tried to choose the most understandable and inoffensive signs from diverse sign languages to make the language easy to learn. However, there is a dominant influence from American Sign Language and European sign languages, and African and Asian signers find IS considerably more difficult to understand.

A book published by the commission in the early 1970s, Gestuno: International Sign Language of the Deaf, contains a vocabulary list of about 1500 signs. The name "Gestuno" was chosen from Italian, meaning "the unity of sign languages", but the name has fallen out of use in favor of the phrase "International Sign".

A parallel development has been occurring in Europe in recent years, where increasing interaction between Deaf communities has led to the emergence of a pan-European pidgin or creole sign. While influenced by International Sign vocabulary and concepts, it is a natural spontaneous occurrence rather than a planned language, and is still in its infancy.

Linguistics
International Sign does not have a fixed grammar, so some argue it's better defined as a vocabulary rather than a complete language. Signers may use the IS signs with the grammar of their own native sign language; what grammatical conventions exist naturally have to be very flexible. A study by Bernice Woll suggested that IS signers even use a large amount of vocabulary from their native language, choosing sign variants that would be more easily understood by a foreigner.

People communicating in International Sign also tend to make heavy use of mime and gesture, as well as a feature common to most signed languages researched to date: an extensive formal system of classifiers. Classifiers are used to describe things, and they transfer well across linguistic barriers. It has been noted that signers are generally better at interlingual communication than non-signers, even without a lingua franca. Perhaps, along with Deaf people's experience with bridging communication barriers, the use of classifiers is a key reason.

Supalla and Webb (1995) claim that International Sign is a kind of a pidgin, but conclude that IS “is more complex than a typical pidgin and indeed is more like that of a full sign language” (p. 347).

Letters and numbers
A manual alphabet is used for fingerspelling names, which is based on the one-handed systems used in Europe and America for representing the Roman alphabet. In a two-way conversation, any manual alphabet known may be used; often one speaker will fingerspell using the alphabet of the other party, as it is often easier to spell quickly in an unfamiliar alphabet than to read quickly. ISL also has a standardised system of numbers as these signs vary greatly between sign languages.

Use of indigenous signs
Each region's own sign is preferred for country and city names. This may be used in conjunction with spelling and classifying for the first instance, and the indigenous sign used alone from then on.

Examples of International Sign

 * Download link (9.4 MB) — Animated WMV movie from WFD congress 2005
 * WFD homepage — contains a short QuickTime video in ISL with English subtitles.