Bodily-sensory modalities are linguistic modalities: supporting participation of people with congenital deafblindness in cultural language practice through insights from the protactile movement and material engagement theory.

INTRODUCTION: This article suggests ways in which a cultural sign language frame for use by and with people with congenital deafblindness might be supported. It proposes including an approach to tactile signing informed by insights from the protactile movement, which grew out of attempts to rework the visual nature of American Sign Language, thereby creating a new tactile language. Protactile language represents a profound commitment to a co-constructive, participatory and enactive form of tactile languaging that goes far beyond improved access to cultural linguistic signs and signing in the tactile modality, extending instead into tactile collaborative meaning-making at a deeper cognitive (conceptual-exploratory) level. Within an enactive embodiment perspective, both cognition and language are activities pursued by embodied subjects in real time, rather than abstract, propositional processes. Language of any kind is always with and from the body, and the sensory modalities of its use must be accessible to speakers and listeners.

METHODS: This article uses perspectives from Material Engagement Theory. We describe two examples from our own (non-protactile) practice and examine these through the lens of protactile language.

RESULTS: We suggest that attending to issues of tactile salience and reciprocity that are grammatically enacted in protactile language is valuable for co-constructive signing with people with congenital deafblindness.

DISCUSSION: Considering the principles of protactile language can enable conversation partners to move from a signal-based, information-relaying frame toward a reciprocal, dialogical communicative frame.