Sutton SignWriting, or simply SignWriting, is a writing system for sign languages. It can be used to write any sign language. It has been used to publish young adult fiction, translate the Bible, caption YouTube videos, and study sign language literacy.
The SignWriting system is visually iconic: its symbols depict the hands, face, and body of a signer. Unlike most writing systems, which are written linearly, the symbols of SignWriting are written two-dimensionally, to represent the signing space.
SignWriting was invented in 1974 by Valerie Sutton, a ballet dancer who eight years earlier had developed a dance notation named Sutton DanceWriting. The current standardized form of SignWriting is known as the International Sign Writing Alphabet (ISWA).
History
Sutton originally created SignWriting in Denmark in the fall of 1974, at the request of professor Lars von der Lieth and others on his research team in the Audiology Research Group at the University of Copenhagen.
Sutton was asked to work on a research project, transcribing the gestures made by Danish hearing and Deaf people while they speak or sign. The project, part of a dissertation by Jan Enggaard Pedersen, showed that Danish Sign Language was a rich language, while the gestures of hearing people were unconnected with language.
Sutton's experience transcribing Danish sign language inspired her to work with Deaf people worldwide, helping them to write their own sign languages. She named the new writing system “SignWriting”.
In 1996, Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), discovered SignWriter and introduced it to his colleagues, beginning Brazil's institutional use of SignWriting.
In 2001, SignWriting was used in a Brazilian Sign Language dictionary containing more than 9,500 signs, which was published by the University of São Paulo.alt=mural on the side of a school building|thumb|SignWriting displayed on the wall of a Deaf school in Brazil
In 2005, the Brazilian government issued Federal Decree 5626, which specified that Brazilian Sign Language be taught in universities and public schools, so it could serve as the primary language of instruction for Deaf students.
SignWriting is used to teach Brazilian Sign Language in 18 Federal Universities and 12 public schools in Brazil. In Germany, it is taught to deaf adults to improve their ability to read and write spoken German. There is also a German website dedicated to SignWriting.
Symbols
SignWriting represents the positions and movements of your body. Because of this, the SignWriting symbols can be used to write any sign language, or even non-linguistic gestures.
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SignWriting has 652 symbols, which are grouped into seven symbol classes: hands; movement; dynamics; head and faces; body; punctuation; and detailed location.
SignWriting has ten basic hand symbols, with all the remaining hand symbols being variations on the basic symbols.
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The hand and movement symbols can be modified to show additional information:
The size of a sign box is variable, and depends on the size and placement of the symbols in the box. This size can change when symbols are added to, deleted from, or moved within a sign.
SignWriting defines two sets of rules for alphabetical ordering: the Sign Spelling Sequence, and the Sign Symbol Sequence.
The Sign Symbol Sequence defines a sort order for lists of signs that have already been assigned individual Sign Spelling Sequences. This order is determined by various symbol properties, and the sign sorting is performed automatically by software.
When handwriting in Block Printing form, each SignWriting symbol is drawn as it appears in the textbook. Of the various hand-written forms, Block Printing is the easiest to read, and the most difficult to write. This difficulty is why some people consider SignWriting to be a cumbersome writing system.
Software
While SignWriting can be written by hand, it is easier to use with software specifically designed for writing it.
SignMaker is an editor for signs and dictionaries. Signs can be exported as graphics files, and dictionaries as text or JavaScript files. The SignMaker application run locally on a computer without an Internet link.
Unicode
Unicode is a character encoding standard which was created so all of the world's writing systems could be used in any software application that supports the standard.
The SignWriting symbol set was added to the Unicode standard in 2015. The added symbols conform to the SignWriting ISWA standard.
Because of this, SignWriting currently cannot be used in software that supports the Unicode standard, and existing SignWriting software uses an alternative standard for encoding SignWriting symbols.
Advantages and disadvantages
SignWriting offers several advantages as a writing system:
- It is simple enough to be learned and used by children.
- It can be used to write any sign language.
- It requires special software – because SignWriting is written spatially, it cannot be used in ordinary word processors and other applications that normally support multiple languages.
To support researchers and software developers who wish to build custom SignWriting applications, these packages are freely available under the MIT Open Source License.
- Complex feature-level searches of SignWriting text in documents and dictionaries, to support research in corpus linguistics.
- Tokenizers, to support machine learning models for SignWriting text, enabling applications such as sign language recognition and translation.
The package @sutton-signwriting/font-ttf includes the SignWriting symbol fonts, which are TrueType fonts distributed under the SIL Open Font License. Separately, Google distributes Noto Sans SignWriting, an OpenType font containing the Unicode SignWriting symbol set.
Formal SignWriting is the character encoding for SignWriting text, which provides the logical foundation for the JavaScript packages.