Bulgarian Sign Language

Bulgarian Sign Language (in Bulgarian: "български жестомимичен език (БЖЕ)") is the language, or perhaps languages, of the deaf community in Bulgaria.

Bulgarian Sign Language
Native to	Bulgaria
Native speakers	37,000 (2014)[1]
Language family	French Sign Austro-Hungarian Sign? Russian Sign Language creole? Bulgarian Sign Language
Language codes
ISO 639-3	bqn
Glottolog	bulg1240[2]

Primary schools were established for the deaf. Russian Sign Language was introduced in 1910, and allowed in the classroom in 1945, and Wittmann (1991) classifies it as a descendant of Russian Sign.[3] However, Bickford (2005) found that Bulgarian Sign formed a cluster with Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and Polish Sign.[4] The language of the classroom is different from that used by adults outside,[1] and it is not clear if Wittmann and Bickford looked at the same language; nor, if one is derived from Russian Sign, if it is a dialect or if it creolized to form a new language.

References

1. Bulgarian Sign Language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Bulgarian Sign Language". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
3. Wittmann, Henri (1991). "Classification linguistique des langues signées non vocalement." Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée 10:1.215–88.
4. Bickford, 2005. The Signed Languages of Eastern Europe