Fingerspelling (or dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. These manual alphabets (also known as finger alphabets or hand alphabets) have often been used in deaf education and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages. There are about forty manual alphabets around the world.Zaitseva, Galina. Jestovaia rech. Dak't'ilologia. (Sign speech. Dactylology.) Vlados. Moscow. 2004. p. 12 Historically, manual alphabets have had a number of additional applications—including use as ciphers, as mnemonics and in silent religious settings.
Forms of manual alphabets As with other forms of manual communication, fingerspelling can be comprehended visually or tactually. The simplest visual form of fingerspelling is tracing the shape of letters in the air and the simplest tactual form is tracing them on the hand. Fingerspelling can be one-handed such as in American Sign Language, French Sign Language and Irish Sign Language, or it can be two-handed such as in British Sign Language.
Fingerspelling in sign languages Fingerspelling has been introduced into certain sign languages by educators and as such has some structural properties that are unlike the visually motivated and multi-layered signs that are typical in deaf sign languages. In many ways fingerspelling serves as a bridge between the sign language and the oral language that surrounds it.
Fingerspelling is used in different sign languages and registers for different purposes. It may be used to represent words from an oral language that have no sign equivalent or for emphasis or clarification or when teaching or learning a sign language.
In American Sign Language (ASL) more lexical items are fingerspelled in casual conversation than in formal or narrative signing.Morford, Jill Patterson, and MacFarlane, James (2003). Frequency Characteristics of American Sign Language. Sign Language Studies, Volume 3, Number 2, Winter 2003, pp. 213–25 Different sign language speech communities use fingerspelling to a greater or lesser degree. At the high end of the scalePadden, Carol A. (2003). How the alphabet came to be used in a sign language, Sign Language Studies, 4.1. Gallaudet University Press fingerspelling makes up about 8.7% of casual signing in ASL and 10% of casual signing in Auslan.Schembri, A. & Johnston, T. (in press). Sociolinguistic variation in fingerspelling in Australian Sign Language (Auslan): A pilot study. Sign Language Studies. The proportion is higher in older signers. Across the Tasman Sea only 2.5% of the corpus of New Zealand Sign Language was found to be fingerspelling.McKee, David and Kennedy, Graeme (2000). Corpus analysis of New Zealand Sign Language. Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research. Amsterdam. July 23rd-27th Fingerspelling did not become a part of NZSL until the 1980s.McKee, R. L., & McKee, D. (2002). A guide to New Zealand Sign Language grammar. Deaf Studies Research Unit, Occasional Publication No. 3, Victoria University of Wellington. Before that words could be spelled or initialized by tracing letters in the air.Forman, Wayne (2003) The ABCs of New Zealand Sign Language: Aerial Spelling. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. Volume 8, Number 1, January 2003. . Fingerspelling does not seem to be used much in the sign languages of Eastern Europe except in schools, . and Italian Sign Language is also said to use very little fingerspelling, and mainly for foreign words. Sign languages that make no use of fingerspelling at all include Kata Kolok and Ban Khor Sign Language.
The speed and clarity of fingerspelling also vary among different signing communities. In Italian Sign Language fingerspelled words are produced relatively slowly and clearly, whereas fingerspelling in standard British Sign Language (BSL) is often rapid so that the individual letters become difficult to distinguish and the word is grasped from the overall hand movement. Most of the letters of the BSL alphabet are produced with two hands but when one hand is occupied the dominant hand may fingerspell onto an imaginary subordinate hand and the word can be recognized by the movement. As with written words, the first and last letters and the length of the word are the most significant factors for recognition.
When people fluent in sign language read fingerspelling they do not usually look at the signer's hand(s) but maintain eye contact, as is normal for sign language. People who are learning fingerspelling often find it impossible to understand it using just their peripheral vision and must look straight at the hand of someone who is fingerspelling. Often they must also ask the signer to fingerspell slowly. It frequently takes years of expressive and receptive practice to become skilled with fingerspelling.
Families of manual alphabets in sign languages
Power et al. (2020) conducted a large-scale data study into the evolution and contemporary character of 76 current and defunct manual alphabets (MAs) of sign languages, postulating the existence of eight groups: an Afghan–Jordanian Group, an Austrian-origin Group (with a Danish Subgroup), a British-origin Group, a French-origin Group, a Polish Group, a Russian Group, a Spanish Group, and a Swedish Group. Notably, several defunct versions of German, Austrian, Hungarian and Danish manual alphabets were part of the Austrian-origin group, while the current MAs of these sign languages are closely related to the French, American, International Sign and other MAs in the French-origin Group. Latvian Sign Language's MA dangled somewhere between the Polish and Russian Groups, Finnish Sign Language (which belongs to the Swedish Sign Language family) had a French-origin MA, while Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (whose lexicon and grammar have independent origins) currently used a two-handed manual alphabet of British origin.
Yoel (2009) demonstrated that American Sign Language is influencing the lexicon and grammar of Maritime Sign Language in various ways, including the fact that the original BANZSL two-handed manual alphabet is no longer used in the Maritimes and has been replaced by the one-handed American manual alphabet, which has been influencing lexicalisation. Although all participants in her survey had learnt and could still produce the BANZSL fingerspelling, they had difficulty doing so, and all participants indicated that it had been a long time since they last used it.
One-handed
Two families of manual alphabets are used for representing the Latin alphabet in the modern world. The more common of the twoCarmel, Simon (1982). International hand alphabet charts. National Association of the Deaf (United States); 2nd edition. (June 1982). is mostly produced on one hand and can be traced back to alphabetic signs used in Europe from at least the early 15th century.
Some manual representations of non-Roman scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Devanagari (e.g. the Nepali manual alphabet), Hebrew, Greek, Thai and Russian alphabets are based to some extent on the one-handed Latin alphabet described above. In some cases, however, the 'basis' is more theory than practice. Thus, for example, in the Japanese manual syllabary only the five vowels (ア /a/, イ /i/, ウ /u/, エ /e/, オ /o/) and the Ca (consonant plus "a' vowel) letters (カ /ka/, サ /sa/, ナ /na/, ハ /ha/, マ /ma/, ヤ /ya/, ラ /ra/, ワ /wa/, but notably not タ /ta/, which would resemble a somewhat rude gesture) derive from the American manual alphabet. In the Nepali Sign Language only four 'letters' derive from the American manual alphabet: अ /a/, ब /b/, म /m/, and र /r/).
The Yugoslav manual alphabet represents characters from the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet as well as Gaj's Latin alphabet.
Manual alphabets based on the Arabic alphabet, the Ethiopian Ge'ez script and the Korean Hangul script use handshapes that are more or less iconic representations of the characters in the writing system.
Two-handed
Two-handed manual alphabets are used by a number of deaf communities; one such alphabet is shared by users of British Sign Language, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language (collectively known as the BANZSL language family) and another is used in Turkish Sign Language. Some of the letters are represented by iconic shapes and in the BANZSL languages the vowels are represented by pointing to the fingertips.
Letters are formed by a dominant hand, which is on top of or alongside the other hand at the point of contact, and a subordinate hand, which uses either the same or a simpler handshape as the dominant hand. Either the left or right hand can be dominant. In a modified tactile form used by deafblind people the signer's hand acts as the dominant hand and the receiver's hand becomes the subordinate hand.
Some signs, such as the sign commonly used for the letter C, may be one-handed.
History of manual alphabets
Latin manual alphabet
Some writers have suggested that the body and hands were used to represent alphabets in Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Assyrian antiquity.Barrois, J. (1850). Dactylologie et langage primitif. Paris 1850; Firmin Didot freres. Certainly, "finger calculus" systems were widespread, and capable of representing numbers up to 1024;Alföldi-Rosenbaum, E. (1971). The finger calculus in antiquity and in the Middle Ages: Studies on Roman game counters part I. Friihmiltelalterliche Studien, 6, 1-9.See also: Menninger, K. (1958). Number words and number symbols: A cultural history of numbers. Translated by Paul Broneer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969. (p. 201). Originally published as Zahlwort und Ziffer (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht). they are still in use today in parts of the Middle East. The practice of substituting letters for numbers and vice versa, known as gematria, was also common, and it is possible that the two practices were combined to produce a finger calculus alphabet. The earliest known manual alphabet, described by the Benedictine monk Bede in 8th century Northumbria, did just that.Bede. (AD 710). De Computo vel Loguela per Gestum Digitorum ("Of counting or speaking with the fingers"), preface to De temporum ratione ("On the reckoning of time"). Illustrated in AD 1140, National Library, Madrid. While the usual purpose of the Latin and Greek finger alphabets described by Bede is unknown, they were unlikely to have been used by deaf people for communication — even though Bede lost his own hearing later in life. Historian Lois Bragg concludes that these alphabets were "only a bookish game."Bragg, Lois (1997). Visual-Kinetic Communication in Europe Before 1600: A Survey of Sign Lexicons and Finger Alphabets Prior to the Rise of Deaf Education. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2:1 Winter 1997
Beginning with R. A. S. Macalister in 1938,Macalister, R. A. S. (1928). The Archaeology of Ireland. London: Meuthen several writers have speculated that the 5th century Irish Ogham script, with its quinary alphabet system, was derived from a finger alphabet that predates even Bede.See, for example: Graves, Robert, (1948). The White Goddess.