Please be upstanding for China’s sign language national anthem
Chinese schools for the deaf start the school year with a standard lexicon as part of a national drive to improve communication
For the pupils at the Beijing Qiyin Experimental School in the heart of the Chinese capital, Saturday was not only the beginning of the academic year, it was the first time they had started the day with an official sign language version of the national anthem.
The children at the school for the deaf lined the courtyard and signed along with a screen displaying the official sequence of signs for the March of the Volunteers, state broadcaster China Central Television reported.
The anthem is part of a top-down movement to standardise Chinese sign language, which, like spoken Chinese, has regional variations that can complicate communication between users from different parts of the country.
The National List of Common Words for Universal Sign Language was officially implemented on July 1 and is the product of a seven-year effort of several government bodies to create a standardised system of signing for the nation’s 33 million hearing-impaired people.
Gong Qunhu, a linguistics professor at Fudan University, said he supported regional variations but a general sign language was an important step for national activities and communication.
“In China, we need a lingua franca, a national language that can make communication between deaf communities easier,” Gong said.