Scottish Highlands Finger Spelling

[meredithp]

Thanks to The World in Words, I learned about “Scottish Finger-Signing.” Apparently Deaf children in the Scottish Highlands used to grow up using exclusively fingerspelling, rather than sign language. Now, TWIW uses the word “language” to describe this, and I disagree with that – it is a manual code for English, not a proper language itself. But in much the same way that the Rochester Method used fingerspelling and speech exclusively (that is, without signs, except the word “and”), that’s how these Scottish people were educated. There is a new documentary* about this type of education, because it has largely died out and children today are educated with sign language – the only remaining practitioners of this type of communication are elderly. The documentary was produced with funds from the local lottery which I think is an excellent use of the money. SignPost has more information on the project, including a BSL video of the story, and even the BBC covered it.

* – Note that the chart at the top is of an unknown finger alphabet – I doubt it’s Scottish, as the UK has a long-lived two-handed tradition of fingerspelling, but I could be wrong.

Comments

[roooof.livejournal.com]

That's definitely NOT the finger-spelling I learned as a kid growing up in Scotland - we learned a two-handed alphabet.

Of course, I don't know much about Scotland's deaf history so I cant say for sure that it isn't Scottish.