International Sign is often described as a modern solution to an old problem: how do people who don’t share a language communicate across borders? As it turns out, North America had its own answer to that exact question centuries before IS ever existed.
A Lingua Franca Centuries in the Making
Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), also known as Hand Talk, served as a common language across much of North America, used for trade, diplomacy, greetings, storytelling, and everyday cross-tribal communication among Native nations speaking dozens of mutually unintelligible spoken languages. Historians don’t know exactly when it first developed, but Spanish colonizers documented its use in Florida and Texas as early as the 1500s. Nations like the Comanche, Blackfeet, and Shoshone, whose nomadic lifestyles brought them into regular contact with linguistically diverse neighbors, were among its most prominent users.
Unlike International Sign, which exists mainly for occasional international gatherings, Hand Talk functioned as genuine everyday infrastructure, spanning a geographic reach researchers describe as stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Calgary, Canada, and used by Deaf and hearing community members alike.
A Language Nearly Lost
Hand Talk’s decline traces to a painful chapter in American history. When Native children were forced into government boarding schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries, English-only policies banned the use of Native languages, including Hand Talk. Strikingly, even Deaf Native children who had grown up using PISL were forced to switch to American Sign Language instead, severing a direct linguistic connection to their own communities.
In 1930, in a direct response to that decline, the Blackfeet Nation of Montana hosted the Indian Sign Language Grand Council, gathering dozens of Native leaders in one of the largest intertribal Indigenous gatherings ever filmed, organized specifically to document and preserve the language before it disappeared further.
A Hidden Link to ASL
Here’s where the story connects directly back to Deaf history: researchers believe Hand Talk significantly influenced the development of American Sign Language itself, through contact with Native Deaf children who attended the American School for the Deaf. Linguists studying ASL’s origins now point to a blend of French Sign Language, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, and Plains Indian Sign Language as its combined ancestry, rather than any single source.
A Language Being Revived
Hand Talk is now considered critically endangered, but it hasn’t disappeared. Nations including the Oneida have taken active steps to revive and teach it, and researchers continue working to document the language more fully before fluent speakers are lost.
The Takeaway
Long before anyone coined the term International Sign, Native nations across North America had already built something remarkably similar: a shared visual language created specifically to connect people who didn’t speak the same tongue. Hand Talk’s story is a powerful reminder that the impulse to bridge language barriers through sign is far older, and far more deeply woven into history, than many people realize.
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