Signed Languages

Sign is not one language. It is a modality, speech carried in the hands and body instead of the voice, and like spoken tongues it takes a different shape in every community that uses it. There is no single signed language of Adamah any more than there is a single spoken one. Each Deaf community grew its own from the precursor gestures its people inherited, corrected, and expanded across generations, and the signs of one region are no more intelligible to the signers of another than Khazgrun is to a speaker of Sylvan. What they share is not vocabulary. It is structure.

Signed languages are found wherever Deaf communities live, which is most places. Each has its own signs and its own history, and often its own relationship to the spoken tongue beside it, because a living language can be carried in the hands as readily as in the mouth. What follows describes the structure common to signed languages across Adamah, set down through the best-documented of them. Treat it as a representative example and not the universal article. The others differ in their signs while sharing the visual-spatial logic below. Each is visual and spatial, signed in three dimensions, with grammar carried by position, motion, direction, and facial expression, and none has a native written form. Fingerspelling exists for proper nouns and Franterra loanwords, but the language itself lives in the hands and in the space between the signers.

Its grammatical type is Topic-Comment with spatial agreement. The signer establishes what is being discussed, then comments on it. Referents placed in physical space are tracked by direction of sign, so a speaker can refer back to a person, object, or concept simply by pointing to where it was first set. The space around the signer becomes a working memory.

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Grammar

Topic-Comment Structure. The signer establishes the topic first, then delivers the comment. A sentence begins by placing what is being discussed, either in sign or in physical space, and then says what is true about it. This is different from subject-verb-object ordering and lets the signer control emphasis by choosing what to raise first.

Spatial Agreement. Referents are assigned locations in the space around the signer. Pointing back to a location refers back to what was placed there. A conversation about three people puts three people in three spots, and from then on every reference to those people is handled by direction of sign. The space becomes a working memory that both speakers share.

Facial Expression as Grammar. Questions, conditionals, negations, and emphasis are carried on the face, not in the hands. Raised eyebrows mark yes/no questions. Furrowed brows mark open questions. A slight head tilt can flip a statement into a conditional. A speaker who signs without using their face is signing half a language.

Conditionals. IF-HAND opens a conditional clause; IF-EDGE closes it or marks the consequence. Signers use these markers when the conditional needs to be explicit rather than carried on the face alone.

Common Use

Signed languages are used for daily speech and storytelling in Deaf communities. They are not ceremonial or ritual languages. They are the languages people use to live in. Storytelling is particularly valued because the three-dimensional signing space lets a skilled narrator stage action directly in front of the audience, walking characters across the space, placing landmarks, and letting the audience watch the story happen rather than hear it described.

A Note on Script

No signed language has a native written form. They are not transcribed; they are performed. When a written record is required, either Franterra or a regional written language is used as a proxy, often with parenthetical notation showing which signs were used. This is a compromise, and fluent signers generally consider it an incomplete record. Video and observation are the only full archives.

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"My hands learned the words before my mother's mouth ever made them. I do not remember the silence feeling like silence."

— Recorded, Storvhall district

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Phonology (IPA)

Signed languages have no spoken phoneme inventory. Their equivalent of phonology is the set of manual parameters (cheremes): handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, plus non-manual markers such as facial expression. These are the minimal contrastive units, the way phonemes are for spoken tongues. There is no native written form, so there is nothing to transcribe in IPA.