Editing Sign language (section)

=== Home sign ===
{{Main|Home sign}}

Informal, rudimentary sign systems are sometimes developed within a single family. For instance, when hearing parents with no sign language skills have a deaf child, the child may develop a system of signs naturally, unless repressed by the parents. The term for these mini-languages is [[home sign]] (sometimes "kitchen sign").<ref>Susan Goldin-Meadow (Goldin-Meadow 2003, Van Deusen, Goldin-Meadow & Miller 2001) has done extensive work on home sign systems. [[Adam Kendon]] (1988) published a seminal study of the homesign system of a deaf [[Enga Province|Enga]] woman from the [[Papua New Guinea]] highlands, with special emphasis on [[iconicity]].</ref>

Home sign arises due to the absence of any other way to communicate. Within the span of a single lifetime and without the support or feedback of a community, the child naturally invents signs to help meet his or her communication needs, and may even develop a few grammatical rules for combining short sequences of signs. Still, this kind of system is inadequate for the intellectual development of a child and it comes nowhere near meeting the standards linguists use to describe a complete language. No type of home sign is recognized as a full language.<ref>The one possible exception to this is Rennellese Sign Language, which has the [[ISO 639-3]] code [rsi]. It only ever had one deaf user, and thus appears to have been a home sign system that was mistakenly-accepted into the ISO 639-3 standard. It has been proposed for deletion from the standard. ({{cite web|title=Change Request Number: 2016-002|url=http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/cr_files/2016-002.pdf|website=ISO 639-3|publisher=SIL International|access-date=2016-07-05|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160128214659/http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/cr_files/2016-002.pdf|archive-date=2016-01-28}})</ref>