When I was in uni my housemates had a baby, and we taught them some sign language so they could communicate before all their mouth parts were coordinated yet. None of us knew Auslan but two of us were familiar with the signs that the State Emergency Services used in the field so we worked with those.
The kid learned to request a drink, which is great, because that's like the #1 most important thing for a baby to be able to request, but instead of learning any of the other signs they just used modified versions of the drink sign to ask for all kinds of things. They couldn't actually make the proper drink sign (it requires some level of hand control) and used a modified wave, so they ended up with a whole bunch of subtly different waves to ask for stuff. Which was pretty fun in public because strangers would coo over this adorable baby who kept waving at them when, in practice, the baby wanted their ice cream.
#you can teach babies sign language before words?#huh i guess i always assumed they'd gain language at the same rate regardless of whether it's spoken or signed
Babies gain language much earlier than they start talking. They can understand you before they know how to make the right word sounds with their mouths. Speaking, like writing, is a feat of incredible physical coordination that we generally undervalue because it's been muscle memory for years or decades, but it involves a lot of very precise coordinated physical movements that take a lot longer to learn than the words themselves do for someone who's new at this whole having a body thing. Complex language is also not all that critical for baby sign language. To a baby, communicating hunger via crying or via reaching towards your food isn't markedly different to communicating it with a hand gesture, and they don't need particularly sophisticated language skills to do any of those things, so you can start teaching them hand signs pretty much as soon as they have a concept of deliberately communicating with others.
Babies do need simple gestures, though, because they're not any better at coordinating their fingers than they are their lips.
