Beyond Speech

Every conlang so far has been a spoken one, with a written form. But language does not need a voice. Deaf communities use fully developed sign languages, some peoples whistle their speech across valleys, and designers have tried to build languages out of gestures, symbols and musical notes. This chapter asks a simple question with a tricky answer: what counts as a language when the medium changes? It also introduces a warning from the sign-language side: designing a language from a desk is much harder than it looks.

Natural Sign Languages Are Full Languages

Natural sign languages, such as British Sign Language and American Sign Language, are not gestures standing in for a spoken language. They have their own grammar, using space, movement, hand shape and facial expression, and they pass all the design features from Introduction to Linguistics, Chapter 1: arbitrary signs, a small set of meaningless parts (hand shape, location, movement) that combine into meaningful signs, the ability to talk about absent things, and unlimited new sentences. They are natural languages: they grew out of communities, not out of a plan.

A striking case is Nicaraguan Sign Language. It emerged when deaf children in Nicaragua, brought together in schools from the late 1970s, built a shared sign language among themselves, and each new group of children gave it more structure. It is one of the few cases where researchers have been able to watch a new language appear. It matters for conlangs because it shows the thing a designed language lacks at the start: a living community that shapes the language by using it.

A Designed Sign Language: Gestuno

In the 1970s the World Federation of the Deaf, wanting a way for deaf people from different countries to talk at international meetings, compiled a vocabulary of about 1,500 signs (the figure in the 1975 book is 1,470) and called it Gestuno. It was a list of signs, with little or no grammar. When people tried to use it at a congress in the mid-1970s, many found it hard to understand.

What happened next is the lesson. Interpreters and deaf signers started using the signs together with ideas from their own sign languages, and added grammar, and the mix gradually became what is now called International Sign. It has little in common with the original published list. So a list of designed signs was not enough, and the language that worked came from use, not from the desk.

Whistled and Drummed Speech

A language can also be carried in a different sound. Silbo Gomero, from La Gomera in the Canary Islands, is a whistled form of Spanish that islanders used to send messages across ravines, over distances of several kilometres. UNESCO recognised it in 2009 as part of the world's intangible cultural heritage. It is not a constructed language: it is natural speech moved into a different medium. The same is true of drummed speech in parts of West Africa, where drums imitate the tones of a tonal language (a detail I give from general knowledge). They matter here because they show that a language and its sound are separable: the same grammar can ride on speech, whistling or drums.

Symbol and Musical Languages

Designers have also tried to build languages from symbols. Blissymbols, devised by Charles Bliss in the mid-twentieth century, is a system of pictorial signs for meanings, later adopted as a communication aid for people who cannot speak (from general knowledge; I did not search this). And Solresol from Chapter 2 is a language of seven musical notes that could be sung, played, signed or whistled. These show a different kind of conlang: one designed to be independent of any one medium.

What "Language" Means When the Medium Changes

The pattern across this chapter is that the design features do not depend on sound. A language is defined by its structure, not by its channel: arbitrary signs, patterned parts, displacement and productivity can be carried by voice, hands, whistles or drums. The second pattern is the warning from Gestuno and Solresol: a designed system becomes a living language only when a community uses it and reshapes it. Chapter 11, A Language Lives, takes up that point.

Hands-On Exercises