Dr's Casebook: Makaton and British Sign Language

Dr Keith Souter writes: I have several relatives who live in France and so I supplemented the daily lessons with phone calls in French.

My elder brother lives in Spain so after a few months I decided to start doing Spanish as well.

Also, since I was writing one of my Scottish detective novels set in Gaelic speaking West Uist, I added Gaelic to the list I was learning.

I have a certain doggedness and am currently almost on a 1200 day streak, not having missed a day since I signed up for it.

Over Christmas I was feeling quite pleased with myself until a two-year old granddaughter put me to shame.

My daughter is a carer and she has been teaching my granddaughter sign language.

I was in awe of her verbal language, but also by her repertoire of signs.

My daughter who uses both British Sign Language (BSL) and Makaton Sign Language in her work told me that she thought more people ought to learn these important languages.

Makaton and British Sign Language are two different ways that people can communicate with each other.

Makaton is excellent at helping people with communication difficulties to improve the way they interact with others.

It was developed in the 1970s and uses a combination of speech, signs and symbols to help people improve their communication skills.

Signs and symbols used together can help individuals whose speech is unclear, or who have no speech, to communicate.

Makaton follows the same grammatical structure as spoken English, and has been adopted by more than 40 countries around the world.

British Sign Language is a visual and gestural language that uses facial expressions, hand shapes and body movements to communicate.

It has a different grammatical structure to spoken English, so you are unable to speak English and communicate with BSL at the same time.

Every day in the UK, hundreds of thousands of the population communicate with British Sign Language, as there are around 150,000 Deaf people or people with hearing impairment who use it in the UK.

That is good reason to explore learning one of these languages.