Whois & Analysis for lifeprint.com

Fingerspelling (or dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands.

These manual alphabets (also known as finger alphabets or hand alphabets), have often been used in deaf education, and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages; there are about forty manual alphabets around the world.

Historically, manual alphabets have had a number of additional applications—including use as ciphers, as mnemonics, and in silent religious settings.

Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication.

When used as a cultural label especially within the culture, the word deaf is often written with a capital D and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign.

When used as a label for the audiological condition, it is written with a lower case d.

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which chiefly uses manual communication to convey meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns.

This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express a speaker's thoughts.

Sign languages share many similarities with spoken languages (sometimes called "oral languages"), which depend primarily on sound, and linguists consider both to be types of natural language.

Although there are some significant differences between signed and spoken languages, such as how they use space grammatically, sign languages show the same linguistic properties and use the same language faculty as do spoken languages.

They should not be confused with body language, which is a kind of non-linguistic communication.

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of anglophone Canada.

Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia.

ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca.

ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF).

It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

Homeschooling, also known as home education, is the education of children inside the home.

Home education is usually conducted by a parent or tutor.

Many families that start out with a formal school structure at home often switch to less formal ways of imparting education outside of school.

"Homeschooling" is the term commonly used in North America, whereas "home education" is more commonly used in the United Kingdom, elsewhere in Europe, and in many Commonwealth countries.