South African Sign Language is the Language of South African's Deaf community.

• It is a real, full, grammatically complex language.
• It is South African, and not used in other countries (although similar dialects are used in other countries, America and Germany.
• It is a visual language created by the Deaf community.
• It is used by an identifiable social language community, so it lives and changes as the society changes.

SASL is different from English in three main ways. These differences occur between other signed and spoken languages as well, because sign languages are all visual and spatial languages and spoken languages are based on sound. Signers can use three options that can never be used by spoken languages:

• Visual motivation for its signs
• Placement and movement in space of its signs
• Simultaneity

SASL, like other international Sign Languages, is a Deaf communication tool. South African Sign Language had its own grammatical structure and is unique in that way. Other international Sigh Languages differ from SASL in that SASL uses different ways of signing. That makes it both hard and interesting to learn SASL.

Productive signs include signs sometimes called "classifiers" or, more properly "classifier predicates". These classifier predicates may include:

• Handling classifiers - e.g. A- ACT- SOCIAL- GAME.
• Semantic or whole - entity classifiers - e.g. -CAR- MOVES, PERSON- MOVE

SASL can refer to as many referents as English can, but may do so in different ways. Signs are different from spoken words because signs frequently share some visual relationship with the referent.

Nevertheless, Signs are not just pantomime and gesture. There are very clear ideas of what makes a "well-formed" sign.

To create a "well-formed" sign, signers need to produce signs with the correct:

• Hand-shape
• Location - e.g.
  • In space
  • On the body
  • Against the other hand
• Movement
  • pathway of the hand or arm through signing space, and at which joint internal movement - especially in relation to which fingers move at which joint
  • Orientation of the palm and fingers
• Non - manual features
  • facial expression
  • eye-gaze
  • eye appearance and blinking
  • head movement
  • lip pattern