SignWriting

Signed languages are full natural languages with their own grammars, and for most of their history they had no written form whatever. That is a different condition from the one most of this building records. Cherokee had no script and a spoken language everyone shared; Fulani had two ill-fitting borrowed alphabets. A signed language has no alphabet to borrow badly, because there is no sound to spell.

The workaround was to write the surrounding spoken language instead — English on the page, a signed language in the room — which leaves the language itself unrecorded and its literature unwritable. SignWriting is an attempt to write the language rather than a translation of it.

Every other script in this registry flattens something that happens in time. This one has to flatten something that happens in space.

Valerie Sutton devised it in 1974, adapting a system she had built two years earlier to notate dance. That origin is the design's central fact: dance notation already had to record a moving body in three dimensions on a flat page, and a signed language poses the same problem with a smaller, denser vocabulary of movement.

A sign is not one gesture but several simultaneous parameters, and the notation gives each its own class of symbol: the shape of the hand, its orientation, where it sits relative to the body, how it moves, and what the face is doing. Facial expression is grammar in signed languages — it marks questions, negation and topic — so a notation that omitted it would be writing without punctuation or intonation.

Those symbols are then arranged inside a two-dimensional space rather than strung in a line. The written sign is a small diagram of a signer seen from the front, and its parts sit where the corresponding parts of the body are. Text runs in vertical columns down the page.

This is the second system in the Notation Annex where position carries the meaning, and it goes further than the first: musical notation uses one semantic axis, and SignWriting uses two.

SignWriting has real users and it is not the standard written form of any signed language. Brazil is where it has gone furthest, with use in deaf education and university work; elsewhere it appears in linguistics, in teaching materials and in community publishing. The competing notation in academic linguistics is HamNoSys, and the competing practice everywhere else is simply writing the spoken language.

Encoding came in 2015. As the Adlam chapter argues, admission to Unicode is now the gate every new script passes, and passing it is a precondition for ordinary use rather than a guarantee of it.

The institute records this as a living script with a small user base, which is what the evidence supports — not as a success and not as a curiosity.