Living in China you end up doing a lot of talking with your hands. In many situations above average miming skills will get you further than decent Mandarin. Even if you do know some Chinese, the more context clues you can pile on the better. The tones can be dangerous and pantomime is your ally.

Let’s say you’re in a restaurant and you need a spoon. You’re going to be yelling across a crowded restaurant full of red faced angry sounding toasts and requests being snapped around the restaurant by other patrons. You know spoon is shaozi but the actual tones have escaped you. Who knows if what comes out of your mouth will mean spoon or some sort of horrible obscenity. Luckily a well practiced spoon-shoveling-food-into-mouth mime will really come in handy and reduce the like of Mandarin mishaps. (It’s sháozi by the way).

Photo: drs2biz

There is a real Chinese sign language, as in one ‘spoken’ by at least some of China’s deaf and hearing impaired citizens. Deaf people, like a lot of people with disabilities, aren’t very visible in China, at least in Beijing, except as beggars. China’s deaf population is estimated at around 21 million but during almost three years in China I’ve never seen Chinese Sign Language in action.

China’s Association of the Deaf have been holding an international Day of the Deaf (actually more like three days, from the end of October to the beginning of November) for over 50 years to raise awareness. China is home to 20 percent of the world’s deaf population and 800,000 of the 20 million person total are below the age of six. The numbers of deaf children are rising by 20-30,000 a year. Hearing aids and other treatments are costly and the Association is looking to raise awareness. “In a country with 1.3 billion people, people with hearing disabilities can’t just wait for help from the government,” said vice chairwoman Yang Yang, “They need to gain the society’s attention and support themselves, and the association has responsibilities to help.”

Chinese Sign Language (中国手语 | Zhōngguó Shǒuyǔ) has been kicking around in one form or another for the last seven centuries but it’s only been under serious construction for the last 50 years.

Photo: Augapfel

The things make that make Chinese difficult for foreigners to learn make it different to translate into visible actions as well. Chinese has relatively few sounds in it but meaning is implied through tones which cannot really be lip-read. Chinese Sign Language employs a system of head nods and blinks to indicate tones. Although foreigners utilize a lot of conductor-like hand waving and karate chops to show tones, that’s not really feasible when you’re using those hands to sign with.

Chinese signers use shapes, motions, and facial expressions to communicate. One of the reasons the sign language has been in flux is that the ways of Romanizing Chinese have changed over time. When zhuyin (also known as Bopomofo) was developed Chinese Sign Language used it as a base for fingerspelling – spelling words instead of acting them. Three decades later when zhuyin was superseded by pinyin, a new fingerspelling system had to be developed.

Just as oral Chinese includes a number of “dialects” Chinese Sign Language also exists in dialect forms. The most popular, a version of the Shanghai dialect is also used in Taiwan and parts of Malaysia. Hong Kong – because, after all it’s “one country, two systems” – has its own version of Chinese Sign Language that corresponds to the Cantonese “dialect”. Although American Sign Language is similar in form to Chinese Sign Language the actual expressions of the signs are quite different.

Some speculate that because Chinese is, in its written form, already a pictorial language it may be easier for deaf Chinese to learn sign language than it is for Americans or Brits. (British and American Sign Language are actually so different as to be mutually unintelligible.) In Chinese Sign Language “person” is indicted by touching index fingers together with the right slightly higher than the left – students of Chinese will immediately recognize this as the character for person (人 | rén).

Photo: Gaël Marziou

On the other hand you’ve got the tones to contend with – expressed through blinks and small head nods. And no one has enough fingers to show characters like sugar (糖 | táng) or annoyance (麻烦 | máfɑn) – although you can probably act the last one out easily enough – which is where the pinyin based alphabet and its corresponding hand signs come in. All-in-all it’s not exactly an easy system. The sign language also closely corresponds to the spoken language. Oral Chinese only has words for “older” and “younger” brother and no general words for that kind of relation – Chinese Sign Language is the same.

American missionary C.R. Mills founded the first Chinese school for the deaf way back in 1887, but in recent years the mainland government has been taking steps to address the growing numbers of hearing impaired. Chinese Sign Language has occasionally been banned in classrooms as it was seen as a crutch, but more recent policy has understood the difficulties of learning how to speak a tonal language without some visual indication of the tones. Tianjin has been the seat of efforts to develop new educational systems and opportunities for students all the way through college and to prepare them for the workforce.

For expats, the spread of Chinese Sign Language would offer a more graceful alternative to our usual flailing and mad gesticulation. Deaf people could run sign language schools for foreigners to teach us how to communicate without inviting the cackles of laughter and unwarranted praise our bumbling attempts at speaking Chinese invariably produce. It could be the start of a unique solidarity movement. Let the deaf and the dumb foreigners unite!

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A great site for learning Chinese Sign Language
Chinese fingerspelling on Sinosplice
China Explorer > Lesson One: Absolute Basics

 

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