Sutton SignWriting

Sutton SignWriting writes signed languages the way an alphabet writes spoken ones: not the meaning of a sign but how it is made. A written sign shows the handshape (𝠀 index finger, 𝡚 flat hand, 𝤃 fist), which way the palm faces, where the hand is in relation to the head 𝧿 and body, how it moves (𝤪 across, 𝥥 forward, 𝦈 in a curve) and what the face does while it moves (𝨊 eyebrows up, 𝨾 a smile, 𝨪 puffed cheeks). Because it records the body rather than any one vocabulary, the same symbols write American Sign Language, Brazilian Libras, German DGS, Nicaraguan ISN or any other sign language.

Valerie Sutton, an American ballet dancer, invented it in 1974. Eight years earlier she had devised DanceWriting, a notation for choreography, and sign language researchers at the University of Copenhagen asked her to use the same approach to write the signing they were recording on video. SignWriting grew out of that collaboration and has been developed since by Sutton's Center for Sutton Movement Writing in California, together with Deaf teachers and writers around the world.

A sign is written from the signer's own point of view, as if you were looking down at your own hands, so the right hand is on the right. Modern SignWriting runs in vertical columns, top to bottom, with each sign placed in its own box and a centre line showing which side of the body the hands are on. Older texts and many dictionaries use horizontal lines instead; both are correct.

The ISWA 2010 alphabet: handshapes, movement, face and body

The International SignWriting Alphabet 2010 (ISWA 2010) is the standard list of symbols. It has 7 categories and 30 groups, which is the order used above: hands (groups 1–10), movement (11–20), dynamics and timing (21), head and face (22–26), body (27–28), detailed location (29) and punctuation (30). The handshape groups are named after the fingers that stand out: group 1 is the index finger 𝠀 𝠁 𝠂, group 2 index and middle 𝠎, group 3 index, middle and thumb 𝠞, group 4 four fingers 𝡄, group 5 five fingers 𝡌 𝡚 𝡦, groups 6 to 8 the little 𝢎, ring 𝢫 and middle 𝣄 fingers, group 9 index and thumb 𝣜 and group 10 the thumb 𝣵 and fist 𝤃.

Each handshape is drawn with a fill that tells you which way the palm faces. A white (hollow) shape like 𝠀 is the palm facing you, black 𝠀𝪜 is the back of the hand, and a half-filled shape is the side. The same three fills repeat for hands held parallel to the floor, which gives six fills in all. On top of that, every symbol can be rotated in eight 45° steps, and the mirror-image set of eight writes the left hand: 6 fills × 16 rotations = 96 variants of each handshape. ISWA 2010 counts 652 base symbols, so the full alphabet runs to over 37,000 forms.

Movement arrows follow the same logic. A double-stemmed arrow 𝤪 moves parallel to the wall in front of the signer (up, down, left, right); a single-stemmed arrow 𝥥 moves parallel to the floor (forward and back). In the full script the arrowhead's fill tells you which hand moves: dark for the right hand, light for the left, and an open head for both hands together. Contact symbols sit next to the hand: 𝤅 touch, 𝤈 grasp, 𝤋 strike, 𝤎 brush, 𝤑 rub, 𝤖 squeeze. Dynamics add speed and tension: 𝧷 fast, 𝧸 slow, 𝧹 tense, 𝧺 relaxed, 𝧻 at the same time, 𝧼 alternating.

SignWriting in Unicode: 672 characters, and why they do not stack

Unicode 8.0 (June 2015) added the Sutton SignWriting block, U+1D800 to U+1DAAF, with 672 characters: the 652 ISWA 2010 base symbols, five fill modifiers 𝪛 𝪜 𝪝 𝪞 𝪟 (fills 2 to 6) and fifteen rotation modifiers 𝪡 to 𝪯 (rotations 2 to 16). Fill 1 and rotation 1 are the base symbol itself, so the index hand turned 90° is written 𝠀𝪣 and the same hand seen from the back is 𝠀𝪜. The modifiers are combining characters: typed after a base symbol, a font that supports them swaps in the rotated or refilled glyph.

What the block cannot do is place one symbol above or beside another. Real SignWriting is two-dimensional: the eyebrows go inside the head circle, the arrow goes above the hand, both hands and the face share one sign box. Unicode's text model is a line of characters, so the block only names the symbols. The Deaf community's own software, SignPuddle, SignMaker and the SignWriting tools built by Steve Slevinski, therefore uses Formal SignWriting (FSW), an ASCII notation with x-y coordinates for every symbol, and a matching private-use encoding called SignWriting in Unicode (SWU). When you see a properly laid-out sign on a web page, that is usually what is behind it.

The practical consequence for copying: the characters on this page are the symbols of the alphabet, perfect for naming a handshape in a linguistics paper, a dictionary entry or a chat message, for listing the ISWA groups, or for teaching. To write a whole sign in its box you need a SignWriting editor, not a text field.

How to type, read and copy SignWriting symbols

Tap any symbol above to copy it. Before you paste it anywhere, check the font: SignWriting is not in the default fonts of Windows, macOS, Android or iOS, so most readers will see an empty box unless a SignWriting font is installed. The free Noto Sans SignWriting (Google, SIL Open Font License) covers the whole block including the fill and rotation modifiers; Sutton's own SuttonSignWriting fonts and the web fonts loaded by SignPuddle do the same. On a web page you can serve the font yourself with @font-face so visitors see the symbols without installing anything.

To type SignWriting rather than paste it, use SignMaker or SignPuddle in a browser: you pick a handshape, click fills and rotations, drag it into the sign box and add arrows and facial symbols around it. SignPuddle also holds community dictionaries for dozens of sign languages, which is the fastest way to find how a sign is written before you try to write it yourself. In Microsoft Word a code point works too: type 1D800 and press Alt+X to get 𝠀, and add the modifier the same way.

A note on the name: on its own, 'signwriting' is also the trade of hand-painting shop signs, and most search results for the bare word are about brushes and enamel paint. The writing system is 'Sutton SignWriting', 'SignWriting' with the capital W, or 'sign language writing'. Fingerspelling is different again: the ASL manual alphabet spells English letters with handshapes, while SignWriting writes the signs themselves. For the Latin letters and emoji hands people use to imitate fingerspelling, see Hand Emoji and Letter Emoji & Alphabet Symbols.

Where SignWriting is used: Deaf schools and the ASL Wikipedia

SignWriting is used wherever people want to read and write a sign language on paper or screen instead of recording video: in Deaf education, where children learn to read their first language before a second, spoken one; in dictionaries and grammars; in linguistics, where it is one of the few notations a Deaf reader can read fluently; and in literature, from children's books to Bible translations. Brazil is the largest community, where SignWriting (Escrita de Sinais) is taught in university Libras programmes and used in Deaf schools, and Nicaragua produced primary-school textbooks in Nicaraguan Sign Language written in SignWriting.

Online, the best-known project is the American Sign Language Wikipedia, written entirely in SignWriting and developed in the Wikimedia Incubator; SignPuddle's open dictionaries and literature collections cover many more languages. Deaf writers also use SignWriting for personal notes, poetry and sign language song lyrics, and it appears in apps that teach signing. Its vocabulary is not fixed: new handshapes and movement symbols are added when a sign language turns out to need them, which is how the alphabet grew to the 2010 list encoded here.