Once you’ve learned the shapes, you can practise by fingerspelling words for each other to “read”. All sign languages have a fingerspelling system to use as an “add-on” for proper nouns like names of places and products which don’t have a recognised sign of their own. Deaf people needed to communicate with each other and so they found a way. Just like spoken languages, sign languages arose out of necessity in each community – they were never some kind of international project. I explain more about this structure in my post Sign Language: why did the chicken cross the road? Hearing people often express surprise that sign language is not the same all over the world. Of course it would be difficult to have a full conversation using fingerspelling only, but at least you can communicate some words this way.Īs I explained in my first blog post about sign languages, BSL is a language in its own right and has its own grammatical structure. I’ve always found that hearing kids enjoy learning the manual alphabet – they find it fun and look at it as a sort of code as well as a way of communicating with someone who’s deaf. If you look at the pictures above, can you see how the handshapes for British Sign Language fingerspelling look like the written letters? It doesn’t take long to learn the “manual alphabet”, but it takes practice to get some speed up and be able to “read” other people’s fingerspelling. Here are some “stills” of finger spelling, seen from the speller’s point of view: You might have seen a sign interpreter on TV fingerspelling a place name, and been amazed at the speed of it and daunted at the thought of trying to learn it.
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