French Sign Language family

The LSF family descends from Old French Sign Language (VLSF), which developed among the deaf community in Paris.

Anderson (1979)[1] postulated the following classification of LSF and its relatives, with derivation from Medieval monks' sign systems, though some lineages are apparently traced by their manual alphabets and thus irrelevant for actual classification: Henri Wittmann (1991)[2][3] has been influential in scholarly attempts at constructing the French Sign Language family tree.

Subsequent scholarly research has confirmed most of his conclusions, but rejected others and expanded the family tree with new branches, while removing others.

Chilean Sign Language (1852) has also been included in the French family but is not listed by Wittmann.

[citation needed] J. Albert Bickford concluded that there was 'no substantive evidence that the [Lyons Sign Language] ever existed' and retired it from Ethnologue in 2017.