The Nepali Constitution of 2015 specifically mentions the right to have education in Sign Language for the deaf.
Nepalese Sign Language may have originated in the first school for the deaf in Nepal, established in Kathmandu in 1966 by an ENT doctor.
The oral policy continued until the arrival of the Patricia Ross, who tried to have total communication introduced into the school in 1985.
One of the chief goals of KAD was social reform of deaf people with an effort to promote and further develop sign language.
[7] Nepalese Sign Language is not used natively by the overwhelming majority of deaf people in Nepal.
While the vast majority of non-hearing Nepalese do not have the opportunity to acquire NSL,[4] those who are a part of the country's active Deaf communities are often well-connected to a wide international network of signers through formal relationships with foreign Deaf organizations and personal relationships with foreign signers.
[11][10] As mentioned above, a one-handed fingerspelling system for devanagari, the Nepali manual alphabet, was developed by KAD with the support of UNICEF.
[13] Gallaudet University reports that NSL was "developed by the Peace Corps from local and American signs".
[14] compared sign-language varieties in India, Pakistan and Nepal and found cognate rates of 62–71%.
Patricia Ross, an American Peace Corps volunteer, was a pioneer in sign language research in Nepal.
[5] Subsequently, the National Deaf Federation Nepal published a much more extensive dictionary,[15] and continues to work on both documenting and supplementing the Nepalese Sign language lexicon.
Thus, in sentences of the type "I gave a book to you" we may have a single sign GIVE, inflected for agreement (motion of the verb begins from the signer and moves towards the recipient) and the handshape of the verb GIVE is modified to incorporate a "thick classifier" handling classifier handshape (object the size and shape of a BOOK).
Typically, in discourse, sentences are short, and verbal arguments (actants) are often left to context (leading to average clause length of less than 2 signs).
Given these two facts, it is hard to a "Basic Word Order" for NSL; nevertheless, in those instances where both agent and patient are lexicalized and where there is no topicalization (e.g. in artificially elicited sentences in isolation), the word order tends to be SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) - just like Nepali and most members of the South Asian Sprachbund.