The French priest Msgr. Charles-Michel de l’Épée is the founder of modern sign language. He was the one who founded the first institute, investing his entire inheritance to give a voice to deaf children.

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Who was the inventor of modern sign language?

An essential means for nearly 450 million people who are deaf worldwide, allowing them access to communication and social inclusion.

It all began with the encounter of a French Catholic priest with two deaf twin sisters in 1760.

 

The inventor of sign language

The priest’s name was Msgr. Charles-Michel de l’Épée and, moved by sincere compassion, he decided to invest his entire family inheritance in the first free public school for the hearing-impaired: the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds in Paris.

A revolutionary school that marked a milestone in the education of the deaf, so much so that today the priest is recognized as a “benefactor of humanity“.

To be precise, Msgr. de l’Épée did not invent signs, he took those already spontaneously used by his students and codified and systematically organized them into what he called “signes méthodiques”, or methodical signs, which reproduced French grammar in structured gestures.

His system also aimed to include young deaf people in the Catholic faith: he was convinced in fact that access to the word would allow them to receive the sacraments and feel like active participants in the life of the Church.

 

The priests who carried on the legacy of Abbé de l’Épée

After the death of Msgr. de l’Épée in 1789, the baton passed to his successor, the French abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, who continued the work and expanded the institute, a model for the entire world. Abbé Sicard’s students in fact brought the method to the United States, where modern American Sign Language (ASL) was born, replacing Old French Sign Language.

In Italy, sign language arrived thanks to Abbé Tommaso Silvestri in 1783, founder of the State Institute for the Deaf in Rome.

Not only priests, but also various nuns founded many of the first schools for the deaf worldwide. Some followed the sign-based method, others the oral approach.

In 2025, in the United States, hundreds of deaf Catholics gathered at a congress from April 4 to 6, organized by the (deaf) priest Fr. Mike Depcik.

The history of sign language in fact predates Abbé de l’Épée and goes back to the Middle Ages, when the Spanish monk Melchor de Yebra documented a manual alphabet used by monks and employed it to instruct the deaf.

In 1620 the priest Juan Pablo de Bonet published a work that included a structured manual alphabet, allowing the association of finger movements with letters and sounds. This text is considered the first systematic European contribution to the study and teaching of the hearing-impaired.

 

The work of Catholic schools

We allow ourselves a parallel that may seem unrelated at first glance.

In recent years millions of people have cried scandal over the presence of mass graves in Canadian residential schools, which turned out to be one of the greatest hate hoaxes of all time.

It was nonetheless an opportunity to condemn Catholic educational methods present in those schools, defended however by the natives themselves.

But why does no one talk about the enormous educational work of the Church and about what it has actually built in centuries of educational and social service through its schools and institutes?

Like those for the deaf, thanks to pioneers such as Abbé de l’Épée. Thousands of children excluded from society found education, dignity and rights thanks to Catholic schools, almost always free of charge.

It is always striking to note how accusations, even without evidence, make the news, while the real good and documented is systematically ignored. At least by the masses.