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Sign Linguistics

4.3.1 Features of Unwritten Languages

		Unwritten languages tend not to have a " standard" form. BSL has no standard form that everyone recognises as the most common or most respected dialect. They have relatively small vocabularies. BSL has quite a small vocabulary but it has all it needs for any use. The dictionary of BSL contains fewer than 2000 signs but BSL also uses many productive signs. They can be more flexible grammatically and allow more ambiguity because they occur "face-to-face" They use AND and THEN a lot to build up their sentences, and their sentence structure is controlled by cause and effect. BSL sentences are made like this. Unwritten languages often repeat ideas, words or phrases. We often see repetition in BSL. Classifiers are a feature of unwritten languages (because they allow the repetition) and BSL uses a lot of classifiers