Zaban Eshareh Irani (ZEI) and its fingerspelling system

Abstract

We begin with a brief sketch of the signed language used by the Iranian Deaf community: Zaban Eshareh Irani (ZEI). Then we discuss a system that is frequently employed in signed languages-fingerspelling-which is the representation of characters in written systems by using conventionalized handshapes. Using ZEI naturalistic data, we describe a manual alphabet system (referred to as the Baghcheban phonetic alphabet in this article) that somewhat resembles Cued Speech but has features similar to those of many fingerspelling systems.