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Sign language
Sign languages convey meaning by manual communication and body language instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns. This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts.

There is no single "sign language". Wherever communities of deaf people exist, sign languages develop. While they use space for grammar in a way that oral languages do not, sign languages exhibit the same linguistic properties and use the same language faculty as do oral languages. Hundreds of sign languages are in use around the world and are at the cores of local deaf cultures. Some sign languages have obtained some form of legal recognition, while others have no status at all. Deaf sign languages are not based on the spoken languages of their region, and often have very different syntax, partly but not entirely owing to their ability to use spatial relationships to express aspects of meaning.

Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Épée was the first person to open a deaf school, in Paris. Épée taught French Sign Language (LSF) to children, and started the spread of many deaf schools across Europe. The American Thomas Gallaudet, who had traveled to England to learn methods of teaching deaf children in order to start a deaf school in the US, witnessed a demonstration of deaf teaching skills from Épée's successor Abbé Sicard and two of the school's deaf faculty members, Laurent Clerc and Jean Massieu. Gallaudet studied under these French masters and perfected his own teaching skills; then, accompanied by Clerc, he returned to the United States, where in 1817 they founded the first successful American deaf school, in Hartford, Connecticut. American Sign Language, or ASL, started to evolve from primarily LSF, and other outside influences.