#hand talk

He's doing hand talk :'D Cute and Sad.

whew okay!! these took awhile to gain motivation for but >:)

Sign languages emojis! Please let me know if any of these are the incorrect acronyms/terms for the sign language, and feel free to request more from me!

We have: 1. American Sign Language (ASL) 2. British, Australian, and New Zealand Sign Language (BANZSL) 3. Chinese Sign Language (CSL) 4. French Sign Language (LSF) 5. Japanese Sign Language (JSL) 6. Levantine Arabic Sign Language (LASL) 7. Spanish Sign Language (LSE) 8. Mexican Sign Language (LSM) 9. Ukrainian Sign Language (USL) 10. Plains Sign Language/Hand Talk

on plains indigenous sign language / hand talk.

Centuries before we had American Sign Language, Native sign languages, broadly known as “Hand Talk,” were thriving across North America. Hand Talk would be influential in the formation of American Sign Language. But it has largely been written out of history.

One of these Hand Talk variations, Plains Indian Sign Language, was used so widely across the Great Plains that it became a lingua franca — a universal language used by both deaf and hearing people to communicate among tribes that didn’t share a common spoken language. At one point, tens of thousands of indigenous people used Plains Indian Sign Language, or PISL, for everything from trade to hunting, conflict, storytelling, and rituals.

But by the late 1800s, the federal government had implemented a policy that would change the course of indigenous history forever: a violent boarding school program designed to forcibly assimilate indigenous children into white American culture — a dark history that we’re still learning more about to this day. Because of a forced “English-only” policy, the boarding school era is one of the main reasons we lost so many Native signers — along with the eventual dominance of ASL in schools for the deaf.

Today, there are just a handful of fluent PISL signers left in the US. In the piece above we hear from two of these signers who have dedicated their lives to studying and revitalizing the language. They show us PISL in action, and help us explore how this ancient language holds centuries of indigenous history.

Read more from Melanie McKay-Cody on the history of Plains Indian Sign Language: https://shareok.org/handle/11244/319767

Check out Lanny Real Bird’s videos:    / @lannyrealbird9015  

Much of the footage of the 1930 Indian Sign Language Council isn’t online, but check out some of it here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

Here are some original books we reference on sign talk: https://archive.org/details/indiansig...https://archive.org/details/indiansig...

The Smithsonian holds lots of photos and archives on Plains Indian Sign Language like this: https://www.si.edu/object/archives/co...

The linguist in me became curious about it, so I did a little digging and found a linguistic theory that explained it: how Italy wasn’t the unified country we know today until after World War Two, and how through most of its history, it was a conglomeration of kingdoms and city states. How during the days of Rome, it was a far-reaching empire of multiple cultures and peoples. How all these disparate groups across the Mediterranean region spoke with unique accents and diverse dialects of the common Latin tongue. How despite these differences, all the average civilians relied on each other for trade and governance and protection, and thus had to figure out a way to understand one another through the differences. How an unofficial, rudimentary sign language was their way of doing that.

The theory goes that these people, for thousands of years and hundreds of generations, used their own bare hands to understand and be understood; that today, the peoples and descendants of those modern nations around the Mediterranean still talk so animatedly with their hands because it’s so deeply ingrained in their cultural DNA. 

I remember growing up how Italian Americans and Greek Americans and Portuguese Americans were stereotyped as being handtalkers. I remember the “joke” about how you could get a Moroccan American to shut up by tying his hands behind his back. I remember being told by my Algebra teacher to sit on my hands when I was talking because my constantly waving hands were a “distraction” to other students. I remember watching videos of myself giving speeches, and being mortified by how noticeably my hands moved with nearly every word, grand gestures that tried absurdly to illustrate the images in my mind with my fingertips, independent of my even realizing it. 

This thing about myself that’s always embarrassed me so much is a habit of human connection written in my DNA after generations of my ancestors wanted to share their lives so desperately that, when confronted with seemingly impossible barriers, they used the very skin on their bones to communicate.