Welcome to the wonderful world of sign language where you will use your hands, body and facial expressions to communicate. People use spoken and written languages to relay ideas, feelings, sentiments, share history and culture. Deaf people use sign language to express similarly.
Deaf Culture and Sign Language
Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviours, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign language as the main means of communication.
Sign language is a general term which refers to a group of languages that are manually produced and visually understood. Sign language is natural to deaf persons who do not orientate their lives to the world of sound. It is not universal though – each nation, state or community with deaf persons will develop its unique sign language.
| Singapore Sign Language (SgSL) |
- A language of the Deaf community in Singapore.
- Visual mode of communication
- Has own grammar and linguistic structure which is different from those of spoken/written language
- Does not relate grammatically to any spoken language
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| Shanghainese Sign Language (SSL) |
- Old version of current Chinese Sign Language (CSL) used in 1950s before it evolved to CSL used by Deaf community in China
- Visual mode of communication
- Does not relate grammatically to any spoken language
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| American Sign Language (ASL) |
- A language of Deaf community in the United States and most of Canada.
- Visual mode of communication
- Has own grammar and linguistic structure which is different from those of spoken/written language
- Does not relate grammatically to any spoken language
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| Signing Exact English (SEE) |
- Not a language.
- Manually coded English system in hand signs.
- Expanded with prepositions, pronouns, affixes, tenses and finger-spelled words to visually represent the English language
- Similar to Morse code, Braille in English
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| Pidgin Sign English (PSE) |
- Not a language
- MIxture of sign language and English in English order.
- Used by most people who can understand English and do not use SEE
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Courses and Programmes We Offer
We offer a range of sign language courses and customised Deaf awareness workshops/programmes. We also cater to the needs of frontline professionals such as medical staff, police, emergency and social workers.
See the table of comparison between courses/programmes
Click here for more details on the profile of our SgSL Instructors.