Fingerspelling and the Appropriation of Language: The Shifting Stakes of a Practice of Signs

Recent studies have proven the specificity and advantages of fingerspelling from a linguistic point of view. However, while the use of fingerspelling is widespread today, it is limited to sign language interactions. The appreciation for both sign language and fingerspelling is recent; in fact, the two systems were often opposed to each other in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century worldwide. While a number of teachers, doctors, and politicians considered fingerspelling, or dactylology, to be a communication method that could stand on its own, it was the object of a double controversy concerning its use in school and in society and concerning the proper production of signs. This article will focus on the invention of manual alphabets and the debates around them, which divided the deaf-mute community in France in the time between Jacob Péreire’s work in 1750 and F. Legrand’s in 1902.