A: Yes. In 2008, China signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of the United Nations and the Convention applies to Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as well. Articles 2 & 30 clearly point out that sign language is a language, and has equal status as a language to the spoken language of hearing people.

A: No. Sign language is the same as the language of hearing people.  As different countries have different languages, native sign languages have developed as a result of respective social and cultural backgrounds.  Thus the deaf people in Hong Kong use Hong Kong Sign Language, and the deaf people in Macau use Macau Sign Language.

A: Yes. Similar to other languages, Hong Kong sign language is not uniform, so the same words can be expressed in many different ways.  ‘Bed’, for example, can be signed as follows:

A:  No. That is because there is a severe lack of vocabulary in Hong Kong Sign Language.  In fact, the creation and publication of sign language vocabulary, such as names of people, places, new words and trendy words often lag behind the brisk pace of the times.  Moreover, sign language vocabulary is often centred around things in everyday life and thus is insufficient to meet the needs of teaching, in subjects such as Mathematics, Liberal Studies, Visual Arts, etc.  Many terms specific to these subjects do not have equivalents in Hong Kong Sign Language.

A: You can first enroll in sign language courses to master basic sign language, and then use this webpage to learn other signs.  In your study of sign language, you need to have more contact with the hearing impaired.  Meanwhile, you may make use of the assessment test function on this website to find out whether you know certain signs.

A: No. This webpage shows signs for vocabulary items.  To communicate, you have to put signs/words into sentences, have more contact with hearing-impaired people, and enroll in sign language courses.

A: Agencies serving the hearing-impaired in Hong Kong operate sign language courses at different levels.  In general they are divided into elementary, intermediate, advanced and professional levels.

A: Yes. To catch up with social development, they do create signs for new vocabulary such as IPAD, Facebook, LCD screens, etc.

A: No. The common syntactical structures are classified according to the ordering of sentence elements: the subject (S), object (O), and predicate (V). Six arrangements, SOV, SVO, VOS, VSO, OSV, and OVS can be identified. The same arrangements are present in the spoken languages of the world as well. SOV is the main syntactical structure in sign language. Although there are different sign languages in different countries, the syntax of all sign languages is roughly the same.