'''Manually Coded Languages''' (MCLMCLs) are representations of spoken languages in a gestural-visual form; that is, "sign language" versions of spoken langauges. They are not the natural languages of [[Deaf community|Deaf communities]], which are often hundreds of years old,; butMCLs were invented by [[Hearing (person)|hearing]] educators of the deaf.
There are many forms of Manually Coded Languages, the oldest known being the [[manual alphabet]]s used in the middle ages (and possibly earlier) in Europe, which encoded a differrentdifferent hand sign for each letter of the [[Latin alphabet]]. Modern MCLs can be traced to the [[Abbé de l'Épée]] in [[18th century]] France, but the real proliferation of such systems occurred in the latter half of the [[20th century]]. Many of these systems ("[[Signed English]]", "Signed German" and so on) share the approach of taking signs ("[[lexicon]]") from the deaf community [[sign language]], adding specially-created signs (often using "initialisations"), and buildbuilding them into a representation of the spoken language. Thus "Signed English" in America (based on [[American Sign Language|ASL]]) has a lexicon quite different to "Signed English" in the UK (based on [[British Sign Language|BSL]]).
Another system that has been adapted for many languages is [[Cued Speech]], which uses a limited number of handshapes and locations near the mouth to differentiate between sounds not distinguishable from on the lips.
