American Sign Language (ASL) is the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States (also known as ) File:Flag of the United States.svg and most of anglophone Canada (also known as ) File:Flag of Canada.svg. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.