Writing Silence: The Quest for a Sign Language Script

Imagine trying to write down a piece of music using only descriptions. Instead of notes on a staff, you write, “a moderately high, clear sound, held for a moment, followed by a slightly lower one.” You’d capture the gist, but lose the precision, the artistry, the very soul of the melody. This is the challenge faced by linguists, educators, and the Deaf community in a quest that has spanned decades: the quest to write silence.

Sign languages, like American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), or any of the hundreds of others worldwide, are not pantomime. They are fully-fledged, grammatically complex languages with their own syntax, morphology, and “phonology.” But their medium isn’t sound produced by the vocal cords; it’s movement, space, and expression. How, then, do you transcribe a language that exists in three dimensions onto a flat, two-dimensional page?

Why Even Try to Write a Visual Language?

Before diving into the “how”, it’s crucial to understand the “why.” The lack of a widely adopted writing system has profound implications. A native, written form of a sign language would serve several key purposes:

• Literature and Art: It would allow for the creation of sign language poetry, novels, and personal letters that can be read, shared, and studied, just like the literary traditions of spoken languages.
• Education: It would enable the printing of textbooks, dictionaries, and learning materials entirely in a native sign language, a powerful tool for Deaf education and for hearing people learning to sign.
• Preservation: Many sign languages are endangered. A writing system provides a robust method for documenting them for future generations and for linguistic analysis.
• Linguistic Status: While linguists know sign languages are real languages, a native script can help solidify this status in the public eye, affording them the same prestige as their spoken counterparts.

For a long time, the most common method has been glossing. This involves using words from a spoken language (like English) written in all-caps to approximate the signs. For example, the ASL sentence for “I need to go home” might be glossed as:

ME GO-TO HOME NEED.

But glossing is a crutch, not a script. It’s a translation tool. It doesn’t capture the nuance of how the sign for “GO-TO” moves through space, the facial expression that indicates urgency, or the specific handshape used. It’s like reading the lyrics to an opera without ever hearing the music.

The Challenge: Deconstructing a Sign

To create a true writing system, one must first break down a sign into its fundamental components, its equivalent of “phonemes.” Linguists have identified several key parameters that every sign language script must account for:

• Handshape (Dez): The shape the hand makes (e.g., a closed fist, an open palm, a single index finger).
• Location (Tab): Where on the body or in the signing space the sign is produced (e.g., on the chin, in front of the chest).
• Movement (Sig): The path and quality of the hand’s movement (e.g., a straight line, a circular motion, a wiggling of the fingers).
• Palm Orientation: The direction the palm faces (e.g., up, down, towards the signer).
• Non-Manual Markers (NMMs): This is arguably the most complex element. It includes facial expressions, eye gaze, head tilts, and shoulder raises. These are not just emotional flair; they are grammatical necessities, used to form questions, create conditional clauses, and modify meaning.

A successful script must be able to encode all these features at once. This is a monumental task, far more complex than the linear string of letters we use for English.

Pioneers of Notation

Stokoe Notation

The first major breakthrough came in the 1960s from William Stokoe, a linguist at Gallaudet University. His work was revolutionary because he was the first to prove that ASL had a structured, systematic “phonology” just like a spoken language. His notation system used a sequence of symbols to represent location, handshape, and movement. For example, a sign might be written as [ ] A ✓, where [ ] represented the torso, A represented a fist handshape, and ✓ represented a downward movement. Stokoe Notation was a phenomenal tool for linguistic analysis, but it was abstract and not intuitive for everyday readers and writers.

Sutton SignWriting

Perhaps the most ambitious and widely used system today is Sutton SignWriting. Developed in the 1970s by Valerie Sutton, who had previously created a system for notating dance, SignWriting takes a radically different approach: it’s visual and iconic. The symbols are designed to look like what they represent.

A symbol for a closed fist looks like a simple square. A symbol for a flat hand looks like a rounded ‘U’. Arrows indicate movement paths, starbursts show contact, and stylized faces above the signs encode the crucial non-manual markers. The script is written vertically, mimicking the way signs are produced from the head down the body.

Imagine the ASL sign for “house.” It’s made with two flat hands that form the roof and sides of a house. In SignWriting, this would be represented by two flat-hand symbols, positioned at an angle, with movement lines showing them tracing the shape of a roof and walls. It’s a visual representation of a visual action.

Today, SignWriting is used to publish articles, stories, and even portions of Wikipedia in ASL. There are digital tools to type it, and it is used in Deaf education in several countries. It is the closest the world has come to a universal script for sign languages.

A Contentious Quest: Is a Script Desirable?

Despite these innovations, no single writing system has been universally adopted by the Deaf community. The quest is not without its controversies. Some argue that the very nature of sign language is ephemeral and kinetic; to pin it to a page is to strip it of its life. With the advent of high-quality video, anyone can record, share, and preserve signed stories and conversations perfectly, making a writing system seem less urgent to some.

Furthermore, there is a cultural resistance to what can feel like another top-down imposition on Deaf culture. Glossing, for all its faults, is simple and widely understood, while learning a complex new script is a significant undertaking.

And yet, the dream persists. The ability to write in one’s own native language is a powerful form of cultural and linguistic expression. A child learning to read and write in SignWriting is not just learning a code; they are seeing their language validated, given the same permanence and prestige as the spoken languages that dominate the world around them.

The quest for a sign language script is more than a linguistic puzzle. It is a profound exploration into what it means to communicate, to preserve culture, and to give a visual voice a new, enduring form. Whether a single system will ever reign supreme, or whether video and glossing will remain the primary tools, the journey itself has already taught us invaluable lessons about the infinite creativity of human language.