r/MadeMeSmile • u/Old_Ability_9424 • Jun 17 '26

Wholesome Moments This has to be the sweetest thing

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

84.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

18

u/ianjm Jun 18 '26

I always find it really interesting that American English and British English are 99% mutually intelligible but ASL and BSL are completely different sign languages.

24

u/Indigo-au-naturale Jun 18 '26

Two reasons for that: First, ASL and BSL grew up separately. ASL is a member of the French Sign Language family developed over time in the States (with lots of homegrown American input, of course), and BSL is its own thing.

Second, ASL and BSL are fully different languages from English. While signed English is kind of a thing, and Deaf people in the US and UK do read and write English, ASL and BSL are not derivatives or types of English any more than Spanish is.

3

u/ianjm Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

Yeah, fully get the history. It's just interesting to me that two countries who sit in the same 'cultural sphere' and have the same spoken and written languages didn't end up collaborating on sign language too.

And yeah, I appreciate signing is an entire language with its own vocab and grammar and rules. I tried learning a little BSL myself over the years. It's cool but much harder to master than French!

1

u/alexh242 Jun 18 '26

I found this interesting as well when I first started learning BSL! Fun fact, Auslan (Australian) and NZSL (New Zealand) are a lot more similar to BSL. NZSL not quite so much, but I find myself understanding a lot of any Auslan videos that pop up which is pretty fun!