Most deaf people in Russia are born to hearing families and therefore are not provided the opportunity to acquire a native-like command of RSL.
This higher status is due to educational policies, such the near-exclusive use of Signed Russian at deaf schools by teachers.
[5] These social factors have caused RSL to be significantly influenced by Russian in its vocabulary and some syntactic structures as well.
[10] RSL classifier predicates use SOV word order[4] and do not seem to be intrinsically associated with particular argument structures.
This form of negation must include the manual sign NOT, but the facial element may spread to other parts of the sentence.
[4] The current legal status of RSL is as follows: There are several problems concerning the study and application of sign language in Russia, which Valery Nikitich Rukhledev, President of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf[13] cited:
On 4 April 2009, at the Russian Council on The Disabled, President Dmitry Medvedev discussed the issue of the status of sign language in Russia.
In his closing remarks, the President of the Russian Federation expressed his opinion:[13] "There is indeed, a distinct lack of sign language translators.
There are considerations and proposals for implementation to resolve the need of training sign language interpreters to provide translation services.
These teachers should be prepared in virtually every federal district, because we have a huge country and it is impossible to imagine having all sign language interpreters trained in Moscow, for example, and this is the only way we can solve this problem.