Ugandan Sign Language is the deaf sign language of Uganda

Uganda

Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...

. Uganda was the second country in the world to recognize sign language in its constitution, in 1995. A Ugandan Sign Language Dictionary has been published. However, knowledge of USL is primarily urban, as access to education for the rural deaf remains poor. Nonetheless, USL is a highly valued element of group identity among the Deaf community.

The first Ugandan schools for the deaf opened in 1962, and several sign languages are reported to have merged in 1988, when sign was allowed in the classroom. This suggests that USL may be a creole

Creole language

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...

 of the local languages that the deaf students created informally in the different schools. There were also influences from ASL

ASL

ASL is a common initialism for American Sign Language, and may also refer to:*Above sea level, altitude measurement*Adobe Source Libraries, a set of open source software libraries by Adobe...

, BSL

British Sign Language

British Sign Language is the sign language used in the United Kingdom , and is the first or preferred language of some deaf people in the UK; there are 125,000 deaf adults in the UK who use BSL plus an estimated 20,000 children. The language makes use of space and involves movement of the hands,...

, and Kenyan Sign Language

Kenyan Sign Language

Kenyan Sign Language is the language of the Deaf community in Kenya, used throughout the country by over half the country's estimated Deaf population of 600,000....

, the first two from the language of instruction in early classrooms, and the latter from Deaf Ugandans who went to Kenya for higher education.

Both the British two-handed manual alphabet

Two-handed manual alphabet

Several manual alphabets in use around the world employ two hands for some or all of the letters.- BANZSL alphabet :This alphabet is used in the BANZSL group of sign languages. It has been used in British Sign Language and Auslan since at least the 19th century, and in New Zealand Sign Language...

 and the American manual alphabet are used, with minor modifications. Fingerspelling and initialized sign

Initialized sign

In sign language, an initialized sign is a word that is signed with a handshape that corresponds to the fingerspelling of the corresponding word in the locally dominant oral language, usually the initial letter of that word. In some cases, this is due to the local oral language having more than one...

s using both alphabets are common among people who learned USL formally as children. Mouthing

Mouthing

In sign language, mouthing is the production of visual syllables with the mouth while signing. Although not present in all sign languages, and sometimes not in signers at all levels of education, where it does occur it may be an essential element of a sign, distinguishing signs which would...

 is also common, with abbreviated syllables from both English and Luganda.