Abbes father works as art director at an advertising agency in Gothenburg. Over four years ago, Abbe was born with cardiac defect and chromosomal abnormalities, and life came to a head. On his blog he writes about being the father of two sons, one of which has a difficult journey ahead of him.

Languages are fun. Every new language you master opens up new opportunities for new discoveries and new friends. Language makes brothers out of strangers and if it wasn’t for the exciting diversity different languages bring it’d make most sense if everyone spoke the same language.

When I first came into contact with sign language, I thought it was international. I thought that you could sign with anyone in the world that knew sign language. But that’s not the case. Sweden has its own, and Britain and France too, for example.

Signing has always been around in a sense, but as late as the fifties, it was more or less forbidden. It was believed that the deaf could learn to talk and listen anyway. Strange. And if we're talking about people who use hand gestures and body language in their communication, Swedes might not come out on top. It’s possible that Finns and the Japanese are even stiffer. Nevertheless, Sweden was the first country in the world (1981) to recognize sign language as a deaf mother tongue.

But it is not only deaf people who sign. Signs are also used by, for example, mentally retarded and people who have language disorders or other speech problems. But then you don’t use the grammar of sign language, which has a different structure than spoken Swedish. The characters are the same, but you only use some of them.

Abbe will show you the hand alphabet in the little movie to get you started. Abbe uses signing. He hears and understands spoken Swedish, but has a syndrome that made his palate not develop properly when he was born and so can’t form certain consonants. With the help of characters I can understand that he means chocolate ball when he says “o-a-olj”. And that's good, because he says it often.