Who invented sign language for the deaf?

Sign language has been used by deaf communities since ancient times. Each group developed its own set of signs, although some of these have become standardised to a degree at national level in recent times. But the result is that there are numerous different and mutually unintelligible systems around the world. American Sign Language is very different from British Sign Language, and the Irish, Danish, Malay and Brazilian languages are all quite different again. An international sign language, originally called Gestuno, was invented for delegates at the first World Games for the Deaf, held in Paris in 1924, and is still used at international occasions.

For centuries deaf children were dismissed as unteachable but in the early 17th century the Spanish priest Juan Pablo Bonet was given the task of teaching the deaf-and-dumb children of his wealthy employer. He developed a system of signing the alphabet, which he published (with illustrations of the gestures) in 1620.

More than a century later, Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée set up a school in Paris where a structured method of signing played a key role.

It became the influential National Institution for Deaf-Mutes, which soon had numerous affiliated schools across Europe. After visiting the school, Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet returned to the USA with one of its former pupils, Laurent Clerc, to found, in 1816, the American School for the Deaf at Hartford, Connecticut. His son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, later founded what would become Gallaudet University for the deaf in Washington, D.C. on land given by local businessman Amos Kendall. These institutions helped to establish American Sign Language, in part based on the French system.

In Britain, sign language was well established by 1720, and was widely used in the growing number of deaf schools and clubs in the 19th century.

 

Many hearing teachers of the deaf took the view that sign language held deaf children back. They favoured the ‘oral system’: teaching deaf children to speak. From the 1880s signing was virtually banned for nearly a century in deaf schools and even in families in many parts of the world.

In the 1970s, damning reports revealed the ineffectiveness of the oral system, and the pioneering work of Doctor William C. Stokoe at Gallaudet University demonstrated that sign language possessed enough features to be considered a language in its own right. Since then, signing has regained its respectability around the world. It has been reintroduced into schools, and now appears on television and at theatre performances, but still with all its diverse national – even regional – variations.

 

For information about sign language in New Zealand, please visit Deaf Aotearoa.