In seventh century England, the years of (672-735), Venerable Bede, a Benedictine monk, proposed a system for representing the letters of the Latin script on the fingers called fingerspelling.
Such alphabets are in widespread use today by signing deaf communities for representing words or phrases of the oral language used in their part of the world.
The earliest known attempt to develop a complete signed mode of a language which could be used to teach deaf children was by the Abbé de l'Épée, an educator from 18th century France.
The real proliferation of such systems occurred in the latter half of the 20th century, and by the 1980s manually coded languages were the dominant form of communication used by teachers and interpreters in classrooms with deaf students in many parts of the world.
In some parts of the world, MCLs continue to be developed and supported by state institutions; a contemporary example is Arabic Sign Language.
The use of MCLs is controversial and has been opposed since Épée's time by "oralists" who believe Deaf people should speak, lipread and use hearing aids rather than sign—and on the other side by members of the American Sign Language (ASL) community (see Deaf culture) who resist a wide or exclusive application of MCLs for both philosophical and practical reasons.
in the U.S. has shown that manually coded English is usually applied incompletely and inconsistently in classrooms[citation needed]: Hearing teachers tend to "cut corners" by not signing word endings and "function words", most likely because they slow down the pace and distort the phrasing of the teacher's natural speech.
While most MCLs are slower than spoken or sign languages, this method is especially so and in modern times is generally considered not to be accessible to children.
Most manually coded languages can accommodate simultaneous communication—that is, signing and speaking at the same time—although the natural pace of speech may need to be slowed down at times.
They aim to be a word-for-word representation of the written form of an oral language, and accordingly require the development of an enormous vocabulary.
[5] Others include the Assisted Kinemes Alphabet (Belgium) and a Persian system developed in 1935 by Jabar Baghtcheban[6]—in addition to the most widespread MHS worldwide, Cued Speech.
Cued speech has been used to prepare deaf children for hearing aids and cochlear implants by teaching the prospective wearer the oral language's phonemes.