Multiple accounts of Columbus landing in the Americas claim that the natives communicated with his crew through sign. To overcome language barriers, the natives developed a standardized system of hand gestures to negotiate with tribes that didn’t speak their language-including European expeditioners. A popular one is that sign made intertribal trade possible. It’s unclear what exactly the system was for, but many different theories exist. The ancient Great Plains Native Americans also developed a complex signing system. Because of the lack of visual obstruction in a plains environment, sign was the most obvious way to communicate without scaring off the animals they were hunting. Researchers believe that hunters on the open plains used signs to communicate to each other from great distances. And these early signing systems were the direct result of humans needing a new way to interact. No one knows exactly when sign language first appeared, but many sources agree that using hands to communicate has been around just as long as spoken language. Did you know that they existed in ancient Greece? And even before recorded history? To give you some perspective on just how amazing and prolific sign language really is, let’s take a deep dive into the long and colorful history of how signs-and ASL in particular-came to be.
Sign languages have been around much longer than most people think.
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