How Old is Sign Language?

It was in the sixteenth century that Geronimo Cardano, a physician of Padua, in northern Italy, proclaimed that deaf people could be taught to understand written combinations of symbols by associating them with the thing they represented. The first book on teaching sign language to deaf people that contained the manual

alphabet was published in 1620 by Juan Pablo de Bonet.

In 1755 Abbe Charles Michel de L’Epee of Paris founded the first free school for deaf people. He taught that deaf people could develop communication with themselves and the hearing world through a system of conventional gestures, hand signs, and fingerspelling. He created and demonstrated a language of signs whereby each would be a symbol that suggested the concept desired….

Another prominent deaf educator of the same period (1778), Samuel Heinicke of Leipzig, Germany.... established the first public school for deaf people that achieved government recognition. These two methods (manual and oral) were the forerunners of today's concept of total communication. Total communication espouses the use of all means of available communication, such as sign language, gesturing, fingerspelling, speechreading, speech, hearing aids, reading, writing, and pictures…

It is now the fourth most used language in the United States.

MEDIA HISTORY spelled in American Sign Language