Sito — deep dive

2,300 words. Part of the Conlangs as Tools project, edition v1.2 (2026-09-27).
Researched and written by Freya bg-sphinx (Claude), from Doruga’s brief; directed and edited by Peter Kaminski, 2026-05-28.
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© Peter Kaminski · CC-BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)

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A note before everything else

Sito is a co-language for hearing communities. It is not a sign language in the Deaf-community sense. Deaf sign languages — ASL, BSL, JSL, LSF, Auslan, Libras, Plains Indian Sign Language, Nicaraguan Sign, and several hundred others — are full natural languages with their own communities, literatures, and rich grammars. Sito does not aim to replace, simplify, or “borrow from” them. Its design borrows linguistic insights (the same insights any modality-aware language design would have to learn from sign): that the hands and the body are sufficient for a complete grammar, that simultaneity matters, that space carries reference. But Sito is for hearing communities who want a shared gesture-primary register for the many situations in which voice is awkward, costly, or wrong.

That framing is load-bearing. Designing Sito in isolation from Deaf researchers and communities would be wrong on its merits and would reproduce a familiar appropriation pattern. The intended development process is the inverse: Deaf linguists and signers consulted at every design step, paid, credited, and given veto. The body of this deep-dive assumes that consultation is happening.

The modality lesson, briefly

Stokoe’s 1960 analysis of ASL showed that signed languages are not pantomime. Every sign decomposes into simultaneously-articulated parameters: TAB (location), DEZ (handshape), SIG (movement), and later ORI (orientation). A signed morpheme is a chord, not a sequence. The implication is structural: any language that takes the body seriously is simultaneous in a way that spoken language is not. Spoken phonemes line up one after another; signed phonemes stack.

Sito inherits the chord-shape. A Sito gesture is also a TAB-DEZ-SIG-ORI chord — handshape at a location, with a movement and a palm orientation. The repertoire is deliberately smaller than ASL’s, both for learnability and because Sito’s role is narrower.

Structure

Lexicon. ~150 chord-glyphs. Each is anatomically minimal: most use one hand; about a third use two hands; about a fifth incorporate a head tilt or a gaze direction.
Two registers. Quiet (movements at shoulder height or below, amplitude ~10cm — usable on a crowded subway). Loud (full-arm, amplitude ~60cm — visible across a room or a hiking trail). The same chord shifts amplitude without changing identity.
Grammar runs on three axes. Sequence (the order of chord-glyphs in time). Body-orientation (whose direction the speaker faces — addressee, referent, absent-referent). Spatial reference (a location in the air, once established, can stand in for a referent the way pronouns do).
No phonology of the throat. Sito has a corresponding vocal register — short voiced grunts and clicks that can disambiguate in noise — but voice is decorative, not load-bearing.

The 150 chord-glyphs, organized

The lexicon falls into eight families. The notation below is descriptive prose; a full Sito reference would use a Stokoe-style table.

1. Perception and attention (14 glyphs)

eye-trace (index finger traces own eye outward) — “I see / I notice”
ear-cup (cupped hand to ear) — “I hear / I attend to”
eye-blink-tap (two-finger tap at the temple) — “I caught that briefly”
hand-shade (flat hand above brow) — “I am looking for”
finger-trace-curve (forefinger traces a wave in the air) — “I follow the gist”

2. Cognition (16 glyphs)

temple-tap then open-palm — “I think / I offer this thought”
temple-tap then closed-fist — “I am holding this thought back”
forehead-press then release — “I am realizing now”
palm-down spiral — “I am uncertain / weighing”
palm-up cup-and-tilt — “I am willing to consider”

3. Movement and progression (18 glyphs)

two-fingers walking on forearm — “go / move / proceed”
palm-push-forward — “begin / start”
palm-pull-back — “stop / pause”
fingertips-circle — “continue / keep going”
flat-palm down on a surface — “settle / rest / let-this-be”

4. Reception and offering (18 glyphs)

cupped-hand toward chest — “give to me / receive”
cupped-hand from chest — “offer / give”
open-palm-up at midline — “here, this”
palm-down sweep — “this is yours”
two-fingers-pinch-and-release — “share / split”

5. Affect (the smallest family — 12 glyphs)

Sito’s affective vocabulary is small by design. It does not aim to do what Korē does. The glyphs that exist are anchors: warm, cold, settled, restless, bright, heavy. Deep emotional discussion code-switches to the speaker’s natural language.

palm-on-heart then forward — “I feel toward you with care”
palm-on-heart then settle — “I feel settled”
flat-hand-tremble — “I am uneasy”
fist-soft-open — “I am letting it go”

6. Spatial and temporal (24 glyphs)

palm-out-then-self — “from there to me”
finger-point-air — “at that location” (also: establishing a referent in space)
finger-trace-circle-wrist — “around / encompassing”
palm-rise-slow — “later / future”
palm-fall-slow — “earlier / past”
palm-still — “now”

7. Logic and structure (18 glyphs)

two-flat-palms together — “and / together”
flat-palms apart — “or / either”
palm-stop — “no / not”
fingertips-up — “yes / so”
palm-question-tilt — ”?“

The largest family. Greetings, acknowledgments, turn-taking markers, politeness shaders, gratitude, apology, request-permission. These are the glyphs that carry social weight; Sito teachers emphasize them first.

raised-thumb tilted slowly side-to-side — “uncertain / loose agreement”
palm-on-chest-bow-head — “I receive your point with care”
two-finger-tap-chest then point — “I, with you, in this thing”
slow-flat-palms-down — “let us settle this room”
eyebrow-raise + open-palm — “please / would you”

The total is 150 by intentional discipline. Lexical expansion happens at the boundary; the community ratifies new chords slowly. A core principle: every new glyph must be one a stiff body can produce. Sito is for the crowded subway, the hospital ward, the public library — places where mobility may be limited.

Body-orientation as grammar

The most distinctive feature of Sito (and its largest debt to natural sign languages) is its use of body-orientation. A Sito speaker establishes loci in the surrounding space — small invisible markers, ratified by a quick finger-point-air — and then refers to them by orientation. Facing the locus is “with you,” “to you,” or “for you.” Facing away from the locus is “from you” or “of you.” Glancing back is “remembering you.”

Two loci are typical in a conversation between three people; four or five are typical in a group of six or seven. Beyond six loci, speakers begin to lose track, and a Sito teacher will gently move the meeting toward voice.

A short worked sequence between two friends meeting at a noisy café (quiet register):

A turns to B, eye-trace → palm-on-heart-forward → palm-rise-slow → palm-on-heart-settle. “I see you. I feel toward you with care. As we go ahead, I feel settled.”

B replies: fingertips-up → two-finger-tap-chest then point → flat-palm down on a surface. “Yes. I am with you in this. Let us let it be.”

Eight chord-glyphs, ten seconds, complete exchange. A bystander would not have to look up to register that something tender just happened.

A worked passage — the trail goodbye

A goodbye-with-acceptance on a hiking trail, where voice would carry too far. Loud register (full-arm).

eye-trace toward the departing friend → “I am watching you go” → two-fingers-walking on forearm tilted away → “in the going” → flat-palm down on the ground in front of self → “I settle here” → palm-rise-slow with gaze upward → “into the time ahead” → raised-thumb tilted slowly side-to-side → “easily, loosely, without grip”

The friend, fifty meters along the trail, returns the close-out gesture and keeps walking. The exchange would have been awkward in voice; in Sito it is grave and unsentimental. The brief gave a three-gesture example for this scene; the loud-register expansion above is what a fluent speaker would do.

What Sito teaches its speakers

1. The body has a vocabulary

Adult learners are surprised, in the first weeks, by how much their hands were already doing — emphasizing, hedging, pointing, holding turn — without being articulate. Sito is a way to name those motions and refine them. Speakers report that after three months, their hand habits in their L1 have shifted: more deliberate, fewer fillers.

2. Silence is not absence of communication

A meeting in which several people are signing quietly to each other while one person speaks is a different shape of meeting. Sito conventions allow side-channel communication — I agree, we should slow down, can we revisit? — without interrupting the speaker. Pilot meetings report a shift in turn-taking: the dominant speaker keeps the floor, but the participants’ agreement and reservation is continuously visible.

3. Hospitals and libraries reorganize

In contexts where voice carries social cost — a children’s hospital ward at night, a research library, a public-transit car at off-hours — Sito gives a register for communication that does not impose on others. The cultural shift, in pilot deployments, has been quiet: people who would otherwise have postponed a question ask it. The information flow is denser; the ambient sound is unchanged.

4. Distance increases (and changes the speech)

The loud register is visible at fifty meters. Hikers, climbers, and farmworkers in pilot communities report sustained conversations across distances that voice could not span. The conversations are necessarily slower — gestures take longer than syllables — and plainer — fine nuance does not carry across fifty meters. The form selects content.

Cross-modality lessons, with care

From ASL and the rest of the Deaf-language families

Sito borrows the chord-structure of Stokoe-decomposable signs and the use of spatial loci for reference. These are not Sito inventions; they are the grammar of the modality. Any gesture-primary language would converge on something similar. What Sito does not borrow: the depth of ASL/BSL/JSL lexicons, their classifier systems, their non-manual grammatical markers (eyebrow position, mouthing, body lean), or their literary cultures.

From Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL)

PISL is the historical record of a sign-primary language used by both hearing and deaf members of dozens of Indigenous nations across North America as a lingua franca in multilingual contexts. The PISL precedent demonstrates that the hearing-community-co-language shape Sito attempts is not novel; it has historical instances. PISL was used in storytelling, ritual, council, and inter-band negotiation. The PISL precedent is more relevant to Sito than International Sign (which is more pidgin-like, with different dynamics).

The PISL precedent also carries a caution: PISL is endangered. Sito’s emergence should not displace existing Indigenous sign traditions, and any Sito deployment in a region with a living traditional sign language should defer to that tradition rather than compete.

From International Sign and Nicaraguan Sign

International Sign is a contact pidgin used at deaf gatherings across languages — useful but expressively limited. Nicaraguan Sign is the famous case of a sign language emerging spontaneously in a newly-assembled deaf community in the 1980s. The latter is evidence that grammar self-organizes in the modality very quickly given a community. Sito is engineered, not emergent; speakers should expect that use will deform the design within years, the way Nicaraguan Sign deformed away from any initial seed.

Where it strains

Affective range. The 12-glyph affect family is too small for grief, conflict, or intimate disclosure. The design choice is intentional: those conversations belong in voice or in writing. The cost is that Sito feels emotionally thin to speakers who try to use it for everything.
Cultural collisions. Some Sito glyphs collide with culturally-loaded gestures elsewhere. The OK-sign, the beckoning-palm-up vs. beckoning-palm-down, the thumbs-up — Sito’s draft repertoire has conflicts in several regions. Pre-deployment audits are essential; some glyphs will need regional variants.
Two-register fluency. Switching between quiet and loud register is not automatic. Pilot speakers regularly use loud-register chords in contexts where quiet would be appropriate, and vice versa. The embarrassment is small but real.
Surveillance asymmetry. A gesture register is visible in places where voice would be private (a bus window, a café from outside). For sensitive conversation, this is a downgrade. Speakers learn to use loci facing away from windows; the workaround is real but imperfect.
The hearing-co-language framing must be maintained. If Sito ever drifts into being treated as a “simpler sign language” by hearing speakers, it will harm Deaf communities by creating a false comparison. The cultural work of holding the distinction — Sito is not sign — is ongoing and never finished.

Open questions

Does sustained Sito use produce measurable changes in turn-taking behavior in mixed meetings (Sito-fluent and not)? Observational corpus study.
In hospital pediatric wards, does Sito reduce sleep disturbance for patients while maintaining caregiver-caregiver communication density? Pilot trial with infrared-microphone monitoring.
What is the L1-influence on Sito uptake? Do L1-English speakers and L1-Mandarin speakers acquire Sito at different rates or use loci differently? (The Mandarin tonal-spatial habit might transfer productively.)
How does Sito interact with spatial computing (AR overlay)? If loci are visible to the camera, an AR system could annotate them — does this speed acquisition, or does it interfere with the natural use of body memory?
What is the relationship between gesture vocabulary and motor cortex recruitment? fMRI work on adult Sito learners would compare with the literature on late-second-language acquisition in voice; sign-language acquisition has been studied here, hearing-co-language has not.

Sources

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