It was the French abbot Charles-Michel. In the mid-eighteenth century, he developed a system of signs to teach deaf children to read and write, which served as the basis for the method used to this day. At the time, children with hearing and speech impairments were illiterate. The abbot founded, in 1755, the first school for the deaf, teaching his students the alphabet with hand gestures describing letter by letter. This method was then perfected over the centuries in the various countries where it was adopted. “In 1856, the French count Ernest Huet, who was deaf, brought French sign language to Brazil”, says Moisés Gazale, director of the National Federation of Education and Integration of the Deaf (Feneis), in Rio de Janeiro. This globalization of the system was facilitated by the fact that the signs also represent – in addition to letters – concepts such as hunger or sleep, allowing communication between people of different nationalities.
In 1966, the American physician Orin Cornett made an important contribution to this language, combining the use of signs with lip reading. Today, each country has its own sign language for the deaf. They all derive from the French manual alphabet, but may vary slightly depending on local grammar. In Brazil the system is known as Libras: Brazilian Sign Language.