New Zealand Sign Language

Why NZSL grew up in secret

Deaf immigrants from Britain brought British Sign Language with them. Dorcas Mitchell taught sign to 42 pupils between 1868 and 1877 on Lyttelton Harbour, but the first school for the deaf, opened at Sumner near Christchurch in 1878, went to Gerrit Van Asch. He followed the Milan congress of 1880, to which no deaf people were invited, in forbidding sign, and would not admit children who could already sign. Oral teaching stayed the school's policy until 1979, and the schools at Titirangi and Kelston kept similar rules.

The children signed anyway, at school and after it, and the Deaf Clubs of the main towns kept the language going for over 100 years with little adult help. When Sumner adopted Total Communication in 1979, it taught Australasian Sign Language, an artificial signed English, and younger signers still mix its signs into their NZSL. Some call the traditional form Old Sign. Differences in vocabulary go back to the student communities of five schools for the deaf.

What makes NZSL its own language

In 1985 Marianne Ahlgren showed in a Victoria University of Wellington thesis that NZSL has a large vocabulary and a consistent grammar of space. It shares 62.5% of its signs with British Sign Language against 33% with American Sign Language, and it can be counted a dialect of BANZSL, the family it forms with British and Australian signing. The two-handed manual alphabet is the one BSL and Auslan use.

NZSL leans more on lip patterns than BSL does, a legacy of oral schooling. Its vocabulary includes Māori concepts such as marae and tangi, and place signs of its own: Rotorua is signed as mud pools. A dictionary of some 4,000 signs, sorted by handshape, appeared in 1998, and an online version with video followed in 2011.

How the sign language act passed

The bill had its first reading on 22 June 2004 with support from every party. The second reading passed 119 to 2 on 23 February 2006, and the third by the same margin on 6 April. It received royal assent on 10 April and became law the next day. The act gives NZSL standing in the legal system and aims at equal access to government information and services. Schools had already used NZSL beside English in a bilingual approach since 1994.