SignWriting Open Rectangle Mouth

It marks an open, rectangular mouth shape within a written sign.

In SignWriting, a mouth shape adds a nonmanual feature: a detail made with the face or body rather than the hands. This mark records the shape; the completed sign supplies the rest of the reading.

SignWriting grew from Valerie Sutton’s movement notation, a way to write visible movement. In 1974, researchers at the University of Copenhagen asked her to record gestures and Danish Sign Language, the sign language used in Denmark, from video. The system let writers record signs through visible movement instead of first translating them into spoken-language words. In 1979, speech specialists at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf asked for notation of mouth, jaw, and tongue movement; that work influenced how mouth movement could be recorded in signed languages.

How do you read it inside a sign?

Read it as one detail in the complete sign.

SignWriting places symbols in two dimensions. Mouth and other facial marks sit with a head symbol, while hand and movement symbols show the rest. Placement shows where the mouth feature belongs.

Meaning varies with the sign language and the sign. A mouth movement can carry meaning or grammar, or belong to a sign’s established form. In speech or lip-reading lessons, a mouth-shape symbol may be paired with a spoken sound; that is the lesson’s convention, not a universal reading of 𝩊.