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Sign Language
Sign Language is a system of manual communication which is used to convey meaning to deaf people. It is more than a few simple gestures, as it involves orientation and movement of the hands, arms and body together with facial expression. It is a complete and total form of communication which allows the speaker to convey any feelings or thoughs.As it is for spoken languages, each country has developed its own Sign Language, which is quite different from the official language of that country. There are aproximately 177 Sign Languages around the world, a number which also includes regional dialects. Indeed, Sign Languages are real languages on their own, with their own set of rules and grammar. Just think that American and British Sign Languages are mutually unintelligible, although hearing people in these two countries speak the same language. To better understand that Sign Languages are independent from spoken languages, if you consider the sentence: "I drove here. It was a pleasant journey" in spoken English you have two separate oral utterances. On the contrary, Sign language conveys the same meaning in a single gesture, because the feeling of "pleasant" is conveyed through body posture and facial expression. So, Sign Languages are not merely the spelling out of the words of a spoken language using gestural symbols.
Sign Language has a complex structure which is made up of different gestures and symbols. Among the symbols, we find photographs or drawings. Picsyms, Sigsymbols or Prcsymbols represent abstract objects sometimes only by drawing lines that suggest the idea, leaving the decodification work to the listener, so that he can learn new words more easily. Pointing is often used to mean real objects, and so if I want to go out I point to the door. Finally, there are two systems based on ortography; the first is the Morse Code, very fast as it is based on a series of dots and dashes; the second is Braille, which is used by deaf people to read and write.
Another tool used in Sign Language is fingerspelling, that is the representation of the letter of the alphabet using only the hands. Fingerspelling is used in sign language for words and names for which there is no sign, even if some words are preferably fingerspelt even when there is an equivalent sign. Fingerspelling can also be used for emphasis, clarification, or (sometimes extensively) when teaching or learning a sign language. The curious thing is that when people are fluent in Sign Language, they don't look at the speaker's hands, because facial expression and body movements are enough to understand the meaning which is conveyed. On the contrary, learners or beginners pay great attention to the hands and sometimes find it difficult to catch every single word as fingerspelling is a quite rapid mean of decodification.