Talk:South African Sign Language

Constitutional status
It is a myth that the Constitution of South Africa recognises SASL, it actually uses the phrase "sign language" in the generic sense and never mentions SASL specifically. Roger (talk) 12:59, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree. -- leuce (talk) 17:49, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

sgn-ZA
Quoting revision by User:GerardM (sgn-ZA is not an ISO-639-2 code) It seems that, although obsolete, sgn-ZA is valid: On the ASL Wikipage, the ISO-639-2 is generically "sgn" without region subtag. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Oguillaume (talk • contribs) 10:58, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
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 * 

"sgn" is an ISO 639-2 code element, but "sgn-ZA" is not, since ISO 639-2 does not recognize region subtags. "sgn-ZA" is recognized in the IANA Language Subtag Registry. DerbertBeak (talk) 02:41, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Doubts about Timothy Reagan's document
Timothy Reagan's document is cited throughout the SASL wikipedia page, but in it Reagan equates SASL with "sign language". He states that both the Constitution and the South African Schools Act mention SASL, but that is untrue -- neither mentions it. I have my doubts about the reliability of this document. --leuce (talk) 17:48, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Number of deaf
"In 2001, Statistics SA stated that there are 412 421 profoundly Deaf people and 1 237 264 extremely hard-of-hearing people in the country." -- http://www.deafnet.co.za/deafaffairs/faq.html --leuce (talk) 08:34, 28 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I like the fact that you losted this information on here. I think it is very useful to know the number of deafs in 2001! An update of that number for right now would be great! IbrahimaA12 (talk) 18:34, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Formally recognised in 1995
The original article said that SASL was "formally recognised in 1995", but I could not determine out exactly what that meant. My guess is that the statement does not refer to government recognition per se, but to recognition by a renowmed institution. In the same year that SANCD was transformed into DeafSA, there was a conference in Bloemfontein about the way forward for Deaf people in South Africa, and what came out of that conference was the desire that all Deaf people in South Africa speak the same sign language, and that kickstarted the development of SASL. DeafSA is a highly renowned entity, and they decided in 1995 to go with SASL. That may be what was meant by the original author when he wrote "formally recognised in 1995". The first formal recognition from outside DeafSA for SASL that I know of at this time, came from PanSALB in 2001. -- leuce (talk) 18:57, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

ASL in South Africa, discouraged?
The original article contained the sentence "ASL is... popular, although since 2006 the teaching of ASL has been officially discouraged. ". The cited reference is a two-page PDF produced by a school student from the United States, which says it, but does not indicate whether the information is anecdotal or from an official source. I could find no indication that the South African government had "officially" discouraged ASL "since 2006" or at any other time. In fact, I'm not even sure if ASL is "popular" in South Africa. -- leuce (talk) 19:17, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

User Largoplazo's reversions of my edits
User Largoplazo reverted my edit twice. Really, I can't be bothered to go and hunt for evidence that the newspaper archive is in fact the newspaper's archive, just because the newspaper's archive's developer didn't leave sufficient clues that it is the newspaper's archive. The most basic of research should confirm it, but that is not enough for user Largoplazo. The reverted edit is this: ''There are as many as twelve distinctly different dialects of sign language in South Africa. '' It concerns a quote of Rocco Hough in the Beeld newspaper of 2008-02-13. Anyway, life goes on. -- leuce (talk) 20:55, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It is perfectly obvious from the subfolder structure of the site and the nature of the text itself that it is in fact an archive of the Beeld newspaper, a respected mainstream daily newspaper published by one of the largest media companies in South Africa. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 22:10, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Does 152.111.1.88 have a reputation as a reliable archive with a reliable directory structure? I don't know what you think you can tell from the text itself. Anyone can write anything on the Internet. But all that aside, I solved the problem, substituting argief.beeld.com for the IP address. —Largo Plazo (talk) 01:47, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The IP address that the archive uses, has changed in the past. When that last happened to me and my bookmarks, I did a quick google to find the new IP address that the archive used.  I'm glad that the domain name argief.beeld.com currently works for the archive, too. -- leuce (talk) 07:50, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Linkfarm
The External links section is excessive, I think it needs some weeding. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:32, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

SASL in neighbouring countries
Is SASL used in countries such as Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, etc, or has it influenced the indigenous sign languages of these countries? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:17, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Member of the BANZSL group or not?
The article is tagged for Category:BANZSL Sign Language family, but there is no supporting claim in the article text. The history mentioned in the article discusses Irish, French and American influences, with only a single passing mention of British. So, is it really a BANZSL language? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:49, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
 * That's a very good question, because the fingerspelling shown is one-handed, while the BANZSL family use two hands. --Hugh7 (talk) 02:42, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 9 external links on South African Sign Language. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131214195412/http://eprints.ru.ac.za/2954/1/GANISO-MA-TR12-54.pdf to http://eprints.ru.ac.za/2954/1/GANISO-MA-TR12-54.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131218014803/http://www.deafsa.co.za/about-us/ to http://www.deafsa.co.za/about-us/
 * Added archive https://archive.is/20140314014814/http://argief.beeld.com/argief/berigte/beeld/2008/02/13/B1/4/tnjdowes.html to http://argief.beeld.com/argief/berigte/beeld/2008/02/13/B1/4/tnjdowes.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131216004151/http://www.deafsa.co.za/documents/SASLI_policy.pdf to http://www.deafsa.co.za/documents/SASLI_policy.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20091111212458/http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=70979 to http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=70979
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121019075756/http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=175746 to http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=175746
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130827233329/http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=70921 to http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=70921
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100114212628/http://web.wits.ac.za/Academic/Humanities/SLLS/Disciplines/SASignLanguage/SASignLanguageGenInf.htm to http://web.wits.ac.za/Academic/Humanities/SLLS/Disciplines/SASignLanguage/SASignLanguageGenInf.htm
 * Added tag to http://www.cs.sun.ac.za/~lvzijl/SASL/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070512211732/http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/index.php?ui=1&sgn=77 to http://www.signbank.org/signpuddle1.5/index.php?ui=1&sgn=77

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Official language status update
I've added a brief statement about the Constitutional Amendment Bill that was published in May 2022, but several sub-sections still need to be updated accordingly. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:40, 19 June 2022 (UTC)