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This past December, a half-dozen of Protactile’s most fluent speakers met up at the University of Chicago. They had come at the invitation of Terra Edwards, a linguistic anthropologist who is studying Protactile with her colleague Brentari, the sign-language linguist.

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Some linguists remain skeptical that Protactile has yet emerged as an independent language. “I think it’s fascinating what’s happening,” Wendy Sandler, a sign-language linguist at the University of Haifa, told me. “But I have a lot of questions about how it’s going to develop.” She said that many of the functions of A.S.L.—for example, the way that parts of sentences are separated spatially on the body—still hadn’t made it into Protactile’s system. “Most P.T. users in the U.S. already know ASL very well and can mentally ‘fill in the gaps,’ ” Sandler said. “But these gaps do not yet seem to be filled in by P.T. itself.”