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You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Burnett. If you're a regular listener,

you've heard us talk often about how the English language is evolving all the time. And sometimes

words fall out of favor and they get replaced. What you might not know is that the same thing

happens with sign language. And in the UK, that's been demonstrated dramatically by something

called the British Sign Language Corpus.

This is a collection of data by researchers who filmed almost 250 deaf people across the UK using sign language.

And Grant, they found some really interesting changes in recent years about the way that they indicate certain terms, particularly those for nationality.

They've been replacing

some of the signs that are now considered offensive. For example, it used to be in the UK that,

to refer to France, you'd mime twirling a mustache, which is kind of stereotypical. But younger

people who sign in the UK now indicate France by making the sign for a rooster's comb because a rooster is sort of the unofficial symbol of France.

And the old sign for India was a finger pointing to an imaginary spot in the middle of your forehead.

Now they use a sign that suggests a triangular shape like the subcontinent of India.

It's fascinating to me because a lot of this changes happened really fast

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