Introduction

Scandinavia is the name of the three independent countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden; the term “the Nordic countries” includes also Finland and Iceland. The histories of these five countries are interwoven politically, linguistically and culturally with relations also to Greenland and the Faeroe Islands. As the present volume includes chapters with analyses of Danish Sign Language, Finnish Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language, the focus in this chapter will be on these three languages. But Danish Sign Language has influenced the sign languages used in Norway, Iceland, Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, so we will briefly sketch the role of Danish Sign Language in these other countries and regions at the end of the section on Danish Sign Language.

The Nordic Council for the Deaf was founded in 1907. One of its original aims was to create a common Nordic sign language, an aim that led to the compilation of the first sign dictionary in Finland (Hoyer 2005) and the second sign dictionary in Denmark. Discussions about common Nordic signs continued at the Nordic congresses for the deaf up through the century (Hoyer 2005), and as late as 1979 a sign dictionary was published in Denmark with some of the signs marked with an “N,” indicating that these signs were new and agreed upon by the Nordic deaf associations (Plum et al. 1979). However, these normative endeavors were not continued and were criticized not the least by deaf people themselves (Hoyer 2005).