Catalan Sign Language is a sign language used by around 18,000 people in different areas of Spain including Barcelona and Catalonia. As of 2012, the Catalan Federation for the Deaf estimates 25,000 LSC signers and roughly 12,000 deaf people around the Catalan lands. It has about 50% intelligibility with Spanish Sign Language. On the basis of mutual intelligibility, lexicon, and social attitudes, linguists have argued that LSC and LSE are distinct languages. Since 1994, LSC has had official status, due to a law to promote the language promulgated by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Catalonia was the first Spanish Autonomous Community to approve a law for a sign language. The Catalan Federation of Deaf People is an NGO founded in 1979 to represent and to defend the rights of deaf associations and individuals to achieve a full social participation and integration. FESOCA organises several courses, activities and meetings. In 2007, a bill was passed in Spain referred to as the "Bill of Deaf People" which was designed to cover sign language issues. There are research groups for LSC, such as ILLESCAT. This centre studies the evolution of the language, makes linguistic studies and creates new neologisms. The 'Platform for Linguistic and Cultural Rights for LSC Users' a.k.a. LSC, Ara! carried out a law to promote this language in the Statute of Autonomy.
Classification
Wittmann suspects that LSC may be part of the French Sign Language family, but transmission to Catalonia would have happened early, and is not easy to demonstrate. Likewise, a Linguistic Professor from the University of Coruna who specializes in LSC, found that the difference between a language like this and other more common forms of sign language is the use of "neutral space" in front of the signer when speaking on real life situations as well as the use of visual character.
Linguistic properties
LSC primarily uses two of the three planes: horizontal and vertical planes. A 2008 study using LSC demonstrated a universal pattern in the manner in the way signed and spoken language are used to communicate ideas. The experiment took into consideration movement, handshape and location as the three modes of comparison and analysis. In another study, the numeral signs of LSC were analyzed, noting the differing methods of signing numbers above five, which found some differences between LSC and American Sign Language and emphasized how these changes can cause a language to change and evolve. Catalan Sign Language is more transparent than Spanish and Catalan. Impersonal sentences in LSC are determinant upon syntactic differences in pronominal forms, role shift, and spatial locations. As in ASL, verbs are divided into simple, deictic, and spatial-locative verbs. The complexity of signing metaphors in LSC was studied in an experiment involving double-mapping, and the iconicity in sign languages like LSC and ASL plays a fundamental role for cognitive theories noting the symbiotic relationship between grammar and bodily cognition. Deaf people in Catalonia are taught to read and write oral languages.
LSC Award
In May 2015 the Departament de Cultura created the LSC Award in order to acknowledge individuals, institutions and initiatives for their contribution to the promotion and spreading of LSC. This biennial award has the same consideration as other awards regarding spoken languages like the Pompeu Fabra Award for Catalan and the Robèrt Lafont Award for Occitan.
