From Gesture to Sign: Sign Language Dictionaries and the Invention of a Language

Abstract

The last fifty years have seen the accelerated compilation of sign language dictionaries in many countries, but France is the only country in which early, repeated attempts were made, with nine dictionaries published in the nineteenth century. The challenges were many: creating signs, establishing a national sign language, inventing a format for a sign language dictionary, and instituting the book's authority as the reference for the language of a community. Starting with Abbé de l'Epée's late-eighteenth-century dictionary and working up to Abbé Lambert's in 1865, this article investigates some of the epistemo logical and formal challenges involved in this undertaking.The deve lopme nt of sign language studies over the last fifty years and the recent protections for sign language enacted by the United Nations and the European Union have had an unprecedented result: the accelerated compilation of signs in national dictionaries