1 What is South African Sign Language? What is the South African Deaf community? Philemon Akach, Eline Demey, Emily Matabane, Mieke Van Herreweghe and Myriam Vermeerbergen 1 What is South African Sign Language? The question “What is South African Sign Language” may look simple but answering it is far from obvious. It is a well-known fact that less than five to ten percent of deaf children are born to Deaf parents and as such are exposed to a signed language at home. The majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents who are not likely to know a signed language. These children start acquiring their signed language only when beginning (pre)school, mostly as a playground variant through contact with (slightly older) peers since signed languages are still not widely used as medium of instruction in deaf education. The atypical acquisition process is but one of the factors likely to influence any signed language. Another such factor is the spoken language(s) used by the surrounding hearing community. Most signers do not (yet) know a written form of their signed language and use an oral language for reading and writing. The signed language and the spoken language(s) will most often have a very different status. Both deaf education and spoken language use are complicated issues in South Africa. There are eleven official spoken languages and even more unofficial ones. Deaf education ranges from no education to certain groups of black deaf children, over education using sign supported speech to other groups of black, coloured and Indian deaf children, to oral education to white deaf children. All of this has played a part in shaping South African Sign Language (SASL). It is therefore not hard to understand that determining the nature of SASL is also far from simple. Deaf education in South Africa Because of the atypical acquisition process – deaf children generally acquire a signed language as their first language (not necessarily their “mother” tongue) at a deaf school, and not at home – schools for the deaf, especially if they are residential schools, play an important role in the development of regional variation in signed languages. As already stated, in many cases the language of instruction in the deaf class room until recently was – and often still is – not a signed language but a spoken language (possibly in its written form) and/or a “signed spoken language” 1 Authors are listed in alphabetical order.