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This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard.

More than 140 sign languages are used today, primarily by deaf communities around the world.

Like spoken languages, each sign language has its own grammar, vocabulary, and other special features.

For example, American Sign Language and British

Sign Language are mutually unintelligible. In fact, American Sign Language has more in common

with French Sign Language, largely because French educators were instrumental in helping

get deaf schools established in the United States during the 19th century.

But while the lineages in development of spoken languages are well studied...

There haven't been a lot of large-scale comparisons of sign languages.

University of Texas-Austin linguist Justin Power.

He and his colleagues aim to address that information

gap. In order to study the question of sign language evolution, we first assembled a database

of manual alphabets from dozens of different sign languages around the world. So a manual alphabet is

sort of a subsystem within a sign language that is used to represent a written

language. So there's a hand shape that corresponds to each letter.

Powers team shows to study manual alphabets because a record of them exists going back to the

late 16th century in Europe. To uncover relationships between the alphabets, the researchers

...