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Sign Language
The term Sign Language is used to signify the set of manual instruments which are used to communicate with deaf people. It involves the movement of all body (orientation and movement of the hands, arms and body plus facial expression), so that it isn't a simple system of few gestures.The majority of the countries are represented by their own spoken language and have also developed a Sign Language which is totally different from the official language of that country. Between Sign Languages and regional dialects there are around 177 languages around the world. Sign Languages can be considered real languages, as they have their own grammar rules and each of them has developed a peculiar structure. This happens also when in two countries it is spoken a virtually identical language, as it is for America and United Kingdom: they both have English as their official language but they have two sign languages which are unintelligible one with the other. So, it should be clear that Sign Languages are independent from spoken languages. A practical example will help to clarify things. To express the sentence "I drove here. It was a pleasant journey", spoken English uses two separate oral phrases. Sign language, on the contrary, expresses the same meaning with a single gesture, as the adjective "pleasant" is conveyed throguh facial expression and body posture. This example should be the evidence that Sign Languages are more than gestures which represent the spelling out of the words of a spoken language.
The structure of Sign Language is quite complex and it includes many symbols and gestures. Photographs and drawings are two examples of widely-used symbols, while Sigsymbols, Prcsymbols and Picsyms are used to represent abstract objects; in particular, they are a good method to learn new words, as they consist in the simple drawing of few lines just to suggest the idea of the object being represented, while the decodification work must be completed by the listener. Real objects are represented through pointing, so that if someone wants to leave a room, he simply points to the door (things can get more complicated here if I point to an object but I want to say something else). There also are two system which are based on ortography, the Morse Code and the Braille System. The first is based on a series of dots and dashes, which makes conversation quite fast; the second is useful for deaf people to read and write.
Fingespelling, which represents the letters of the alphabet using the hands, is another useful tool of Sign Language. It is usually used to represent names for which there is no other sign, but sometimes it is preferred even if it exists the equivalent sign. Fingespaelling is also used to add emphasis, to clarify some concepts or when learning or teaching a sign language. When people become highly skillful with Sign Language, they no more look at the speaker's hands, but to get the overall meaning of the sentence they simply observe body movements and facial expressions. On the contrary, learners or beginners use the opposite method, paying attention to the speaker's hands. Although they do so, sometimes they miss parts of the sentence, because fingespelling is a quite rapid mean of communication.