American Sign Language: Definition from Answers.com

American Sign Language (ASL) is a visual-gestural language used primarily by deaf residents of the United States and parts of Canada. It became a fully developed communication system only in the early nineteenth century, following contact between the American reformer Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and deaf Frenchman Laurent Clerc. In 1815, Gallaudet, an evangelical Protestant minister from Hartford, Connecticut, traveled to England and then to France to learn how to instruct deaf children. Gallaudet became acquainted with Clerc at the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris, where Clerc taught, and in 1816 invited him to return to the United States. The next year, Gallaudet, Clerc, and a group of philanthropists opened a school for deaf children in Hartford, today's American School for the Deaf. The American School became the incubator for ASL.

Clerc's influence on the new language was enormous. He taught sign language to the American School's first principal, Gallaudet, to the first generation of the school's teachers, and to several generations of deaf students. For decades, his finest pupils became the lead teachers at other deaf schools in the United States, employing the signing that Clerc taught them. Modern examination of the lexical similarity of ASL and Clerc's native French Sign Language suggests that the languages share more than 50 percent of their vocabularies, reinforcing the historical evidence of Clerc's role. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, critic Alexander Graham Bell charged that ASL was foreign, an import from France, and therefore fundamentally subversive of American culture and institutions.

Yet ASL's origins lie in both Europe and the United States. Clerc stated that he modified the sign language he brought from his homeland to fit American customs. School records indicate that many of the students who first attended the American School came from families with other deaf members; it is well known that in such situations deaf people typically create a shared system of gestures. These probably influenced ASL's early development, although the mechanism and the results—on ASL's lexicon, morphology, or syntax, for example—are not understood.

Natural change through time has influenced ASL. Many signs initially were close visual representations of the physical world of actions and things. Early nineteenth century ASL practitioners claimed that its power lay in the language's obvious mimetic characteristics. Studies of late-twentieth-century ASL, however, indicated that its signs by then were not in the least transparent to naive observers. Modern linguistic studies suggest that, in general, signs become smaller, more symmetrical, and more centrally located as sign languages mature and as iconicity is sacrificed for ease of production and comprehension.

ASL also reflects the influence of English. Initialized signs, made with a handshape that represents a particular letter in an English word, are common in ASL. The hand-shape for the letter G thus is used in the formation of the sign for the color "green," and the handshape for the letter B is necessary to produce the signs for "blue," "brown," and "beer." Furthermore, modern ASL incorporates a number of signs derived from the modification of fingerspelled English words. The usual ASL sign meaning affirmation or agreement, for instance, is a contraction of three finger-spelled letters, Y-E-S, into a single movement from the Y handshape to the S handshape. Similarly, word order in ASL may be undergoing modification, losing its dominant subject-object-verb pattern for the common English subject-verb-object.

The relationship between ASL and English has been contentious and negotiated throughout the language's history, and the boundary between ASL and English in a signed form is neither agreed upon nor unchanging. Clerc brought from France not only the language of deaf Parisians but also "methodical signs." The Abbé Charles Michel de l'Epée, founder of the National Institute in Paris in the 1770s, invented the latter to modify French Sign Language to conform to the rules of written French. For example, Epée appended elaborate grammatical mark-ers to lexical terms borrowed from French Sign Language, and every word of spoken or written French had a direct equivalent in Epée's usage. Clerc learned methodical signs while a student at the Paris Institute. After arrival in the United States, he altered these to conform to English grammar. Clerc led the American School to use both English-like methodical signs and the "natural" or "colloquial" sign language of deaf people for instruction.

American educators debated the relative merits of methodical signs and ASL from the 1830s until after the Civil War. ASL proponents claimed that English-like signing taught students to create the forms of English without understanding. They noted that outside of the classroom deaf people used only natural sign language, as ASL was then called, for it conveyed meaning quickly, clearly, and easily. They believed that it should be allowed to remain separate and distinct from English. Others claimed that methodical signing's close relationship to English provided deaf children with greater access to written language. This argument eventually lost its urgency, however, as changing cultural attitudes condemned all signed communication.

Beginning in the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell led a loose coalition of progressive educational reformers, nationalists, and eugenicists who attacked ASL and advocated the use of speech and speech reading in its place. They claimed that signing was primitive, associated with backward peoples; that its ease of use prevented deaf people from learning to speak; that it nurtured among deaf people a culture apart from the mainstream and thus threatened American cultural homogeneity; and that it encouraged deaf people to marry among themselves, possibly threatening the nation with the birth of more deaf children. Most hearing educators, hearing parents of deaf children, and school governing boards accepted these claims for decades. By the 1890s, schools were firing deaf teachers and banishing ASL from classrooms. Serious study of ASL, which had marked its early years, ceased.

Deaf Americans nevertheless kept ASL vibrant as the twentieth century began, passing it from pupil to pupil in school dormitories and playgrounds and from adult to adult in deaf clubs. Deaf leaders produced ASL dictionaries, and they filmed ASL masters to preserve classic forms for future generations. Various local deaf communities argued for ASL's reacceptance into schools. The educational failure of speech and speech reading, moreover, became increasingly obvious in the late twentieth century.

ASL's rehabilitation began about 1960 with the studies of William C. Stokoe and his colleagues at Gallaudet University. Stokoe showed that ASL, which was commonly used by his deaf students, was not a corrupt form of English but a language in its own right. Subsequent studies confirmed and developed Stokoe's insight and identified the qualities that distinguish true signed languages, like ASL, from other forms of visual communication, such as gesture or semaphore.

The American civil rights movement provided the broader context within which ASL achieved scholarly and cultural acceptance in the late twentieth century. Public policy was no longer openly hostile to ethnic and linguistic diversity, affording deaf people some success in their demand to use their preferred language in social and legal contexts. By the 1970s, some schools had begun experimenting with the introduction of signed forms of English in the classroom. The next step was the introduction of ASL itself as the language of instruction. The old argument about the educational advantages of ASL versus English-like signing reemerged.

Some of the same cultural shifts that assisted ASL in gaining recognition in the late twentieth century, however, suggested that its future as a means of everyday discourse was not assured in the twenty-first century. Educational structures that concentrated deaf people in separate residential schools were no longer in favor. Technical devices to improve hearing, called cochlear implants, had made progress, and medical discoveries raised the possibility of eliminating genetic causes of deafness. Together, these changes had the potential to weaken or destroy the American deaf community.

Bibliography

Baynton, Douglas C. Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. The most important source for the history of ASL.

Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York: Random House, 1984.

Padden, Carol, and Tom Humphries. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. See for the linguistics of ASL and for ASL's place in American deaf culture.

Stedt, Joseph D., and Donald F. Moores. "Manual Codes on English and American Sign Language: Historical Perspectives and Current Realities." In Manual Communication: Implications for Educators. Edited by Harry Bornstein. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1990.

Van Cleve, John Vickrey, and Barry A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1989.

"ASL" redirects here. For other uses, see ASL (disambiguation).

This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. WikiProject Languages or the Languages Portal may be able to help recruit one. (September 2008)

American Sign Language
Signed in	United States, Canada
Region	Anglophone North America
Total signers	500,000 to 2 million in the US alone (100,000 to 500,000 primary users (1986 Gallaudet Univ.) out of nearly 2,000,000 profoundly deaf persons in the US (1988), 0.8% of the US population. 15,000,000 hard of hearing persons in the US (1989 Sacks) (from SIL Ethnologue)
Language family	emerging primarily from Old French Sign Language, with significant input from Martha's Vineyard Sign Language and various home sign systems
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	`sgn`
ISO 639-3	`ase`

sign language — list of sign languages — legal recognition

American Sign Language (or ASL, Ameslan) is the dominant sign language of the Deaf community in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico. Although the United Kingdom and the United States share English as a spoken and written language, British Sign Language (BSL) is quite different from ASL, and the two sign languages are not mutually intelligible.

ASL is also used (sometimes alongside indigenous sign languages) in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe. Like other sign languages, its grammar and syntax are distinct from any spoken language in its area of influence. While there has been no reliable survey of the number of people who use ASL as their primary language, estimates range from 500,000 to 2 million in the United States alone^{[citation needed]}.

1 History of ASL
2 Linguistics
3 Writing systems
4 Baby Sign
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

History of ASL

A sign language interpreter at a presentation

In the United States, as elsewhere in the world, hearing families with deaf children often employ ad-hoc home sign for simple communications. Today though, ASL classes are offered in many secondary and postsecondary schools. ASL is a language distinct from spoken English; it contains its own syntax and grammar and supports its own culture. The origin of modern ASL is ultimately tied to the confluence of many events and circumstances, including historical attempts at deaf education; the unique situation present on a small island in Massachusetts; the attempts of a father to enlist a local minister to help educate his deaf daughter; and in no small part the ingenuity and genius of people (in this case deaf people) for language itself.

Prior sign languages

France

The French had a natural sign language, which is often referred to as Old French Sign Language (OFSL). OFSL was the language of a large community of Deaf people living in Paris. This language was passed down from deaf person to deaf person, and may be the oldest sign language of Europe. The Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Épée was the first to acknowledge that signed language could be used to educate the deaf.

An oft-repeated deaf folk tale explains Épée's role in the origin of LSF (and later, ASL): While visiting a parishioner, Épee met two deaf daughters conversing with each other using OFSL. The mother explained that her daughters were being educated privately by means of pictures. Épée was inspired by these deaf children and in 1771 established the first educational institution for the deaf.^[1] He created a series of grammatical signs to represent French grammatical markers (called "methodical signs") and taught those to his students. At Épée's school, a large group of Deaf children lived together for the first time in France and it is this generation of native speakers which most likely developed OFSL into a full language. The combination of OFSL, methodical signs, and possibly other influences came together and evolved into French Sign Language, LSF.

United States

Little is known of sign languages in the United States before 1817. It is said that since there was little contact between communities in early America, home sign language was likely used most widely. However, a deaf community on Martha’s Vineyard in the late 17th century used a natural sign language. From 1690 to the mid-twentieth century there was a high rate of genetic deafness on Martha’s Vineyard caused by the founder effect. It afforded almost everyone the opportunity to have frequent contact with sign language. It was said that 1 out of 155 people on the island was deaf, compared with 1 out of 5700 people in the rest of America during that time. The ancestry of the deaf community could be linked to The Weald, a small area in England.

Plains Indians

In 1541, 1688, 1740, 1805, and 1828 were reports that the Plains Indians developed a sign language to communicate between tribes of different languages. This sign language is believed to have developed in the lower Rio Grande prior to the Europeans settling and to have spread northward and become what is known as Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL). There is no evidence to show that it influenced the development of American Sign Language. By 1885, PISL had an estimated 110,000 users of various tribal dialects, but today it has only a small fraction of that number.

Birth of American Sign Language and American School for the Deaf

In 1815,a Protestant minister, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, left his home in Hartford, Connecticut and to visit Europe. Dr. Mason Cogswell asked Gallaudet to investigate methods of teaching his deaf daughter. While in England, Gallaudet hit a roadblock when directors of the Braidwood Schools, who taught the oral method, refused to share their methods of teaching. Nevertheless, while in London, Gallaudet met with Abbe Sicard, director of the Royal Institution for the Deaf in Paris and two of his students, one of which was Laurent Clerc. Sicard invited Gallaudet to visit the school in Paris. He did not go immediately, but instead traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland where he again met the methods of Braidwoods. They again refused to teach him their methods. Gallaudet then traveled to Paris and learned the educational methods of the Royal Institution for the Deaf with sign language, a combination of Old French Sign Language and the signs developed by Abbė de l’Epėe. Gallaudet persuaded Clerc to return with him to Connecticut and become a teacher for the deaf. Gallaudet and Clerc opened up the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons (now called American School for the Deaf) in April 1817. Deaf students were taught French signs and brought in signs of their own, such as those from Martha’s Vineyard. Thus, it was at this school that all these influences would intermingle and become what is now known as American Sign Language.

Growth and standardization

American Sign Language Convention of March 2008 in Austin, Texas

Interestingly, because of the early influence of the sign language of France upon the school, the vocabularies of ASL and modern French Sign Language are approximately 60% shared, whereas ASL and British Sign Language, for example, are almost completely dissimilar.

From its synthesis at this first public school for the deaf in North America, the language went on to grow. Many of the graduates of this school went on to found schools of their own in many other states, thus spreading the methods of Gallaudet and Clerc and serving to expand and standardize the language; as with most languages though, there are regional variations.

Oralism vs. Manualism

After being strongly established in the United States there was a bitter fight between those who supported oralism over manualism in the late 1800s. Many notable individuals of high standing contributed to this debate, such as Alexander Graham Bell. The oralists won many battles and for a long time the use of sign was suppressed, socially and pedagogically. Many considered sign to not even be a language at all. This situation was changed by William Stokoe, a professor of English hired at Gallaudet University in 1955. He immediately became fascinated by ASL and began serious study of it. Eventually, through publication in linguistics journals of articles containing detailed linguistic analysis of ASL, he was able to convince the scientific mainstream that ASL was indeed a natural language on a par with any other.

A living language

The language continues to grow and change like any living language. In particular, ASL constantly adds new signs in an attempt to keep up with constantly changing technology.^{[citation needed]} For example, there is now an ASL sign for INTERNET and a sign for Video blog (wherein both L hands touching at thumb tips rotate from palm down to palm forward).

Linguistics

A group of people signing.

ASL is a natural language as proved to the satisfaction of the linguistic community by William Stokoe, and contains phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics just like spoken languages. It is a manual language or visual language, meaning that the information is expressed not with combinations of sounds but with combinations of handshapes, palm orientations, movements of the hands, arms and body, location in relation to the body, and facial expressions. While spoken languages are produced by the vocal cords only, and can thus be easily written in linear patterns, ASL uses the hands, head and body, with constantly changing movements and orientations. Like other natural sign languages, it is "three dimensional" in this sense.^[2]^[3] ASL is used natively and predominantly by the Deaf and hard-of-hearing of the United States and Canada.

Iconicity

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Although it often seems as though the signs are meaningful of themselves, in fact they can be as arbitrary as words in spoken language. For example, a speaking child may often make the mistake of using the word "you" to refer to themselves, since others use that word to refer to him or her. Children who acquire the sign YOU (pointing at one's interlocutor) make similar mistakes – they will point at others to mean themselves, indicating that even something as seemingly explicit as pointing is an arbitrary sign in ASL, like words in a spoken language.

However, Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi have modified the common theory that signs can be self-explanatory by grouping signs into three categories:

Transparent: Non-signers can usually correctly guess the meaning
Translucent: Meaning makes sense to non-signers once it is explained
Opaque: Meaning cannot be guessed by non-signers

Klima and Bellugi used American Sign Language in formulating that classification. The theory that signs are self-explanatory can be conclusively disproved by the fact that non-signers cannot understand fluent, continuous sign language. The majority of signs are opaque.

Generally, signs that are "Transparent" are signs of objects or words that became popular after the basics of ASL were established. There are, of course, exceptions to this.

Fingerspelling

Main article: Fingerspelling

In ASL, fingerspelling is used primarily for proper nouns, for emphasis (for example, fingerspelling STOP is more emphatic than signing 'stop'), for clarity, and for instruction.

The American manual alphabet in photographs

ASL includes both fingerspelling borrowings from English, as well as the incorporation of alphabetic letters from English words into ASL signs to distinguish related meanings of what would otherwise be covered by a single sign in ASL. For example, two hands trace a circle to mean 'a group of people'. Several kinds of groups can be specified by handshape: When made with C hands, the sign means 'class'; when made with the F handshape, it means 'family'. Such signs are often referred to as "initialized" signs because they substitute the first letter (the initial) of the corresponding English word as the handshape in order to provide a more specific meaning.

When using alphabetic letters in these ways, several otherwise non-phonemic handshapes become distinctive. For example, outside fingerspelling there is but a single fist handshape - the placement of the thumb is irrelevant. However, within fingerspelling, the position of the thumb on the fist distinguishes the letters A, S, and T. Letter-incorporated signs which rely on such minor distinctions as thumb position tend not to be stable in the long run^{[citation needed]}, but they may eventually create new distinctions in the language. For example, due to signs such as 'elevator', which may require the E handshape (depending on the sign used), some argue that E has become phonemically distinct from the 5/claw handshape.

Fingerspelling has also given way to a class of signs known as "loan signs" or "borrowed signs." Sometimes defined as "lexicalized fingerspelling," loan signs are somewhat frequent and represent an English word which has, over time, developed a unique movement and shape. Sometimes loan signs are not even recognized as such because they are so frequently used and their movement has become so specialized. Loan signs are usually glossed as the English word in all capital letters preceded by the pound sign(#). Loan signs are sometimes used for emphasis (like the loan sign #YES substituted for the sign YES), but sometimes represent the only form of the sign (e.g., #NO). Probably the most commonly used example of a loan sign is the sign for NO. In this sign, the first two fingers are fused, held out straight, and then tapped against the thumb in a repeated motion. When broken down, it can be seen that this movement is an abbreviated way of fingerspelling N-O-N-O. Other commonly known loan signs include #BACK, #BUS, #CAR, #JOB, #PIZZA, and #YES.

Grammar

Main article: American Sign Language grammar

Writing systems

American Sign Language as expressed in Sign Writing.

ASL is often written with English words in all capital letters, which is known as glossing. This is, however, a method used simply to teach the structure of the language. ASL is a visual language, not a written language. There is no one-to-one correspondence between words in ASL and English, and much of the inflectional modulation of ASL signs is lost.

There are two true writing systems in use for ASL: a phonemic Stokoe notation, which has a separate symbol or diacritic mark for every phonemic hand shape, motion, and position (though it leaves something to be desired in the representation of facial expression), and a more popular iconic system called SignWriting, which represents each sign with a rather abstract illustration of its salient features. SignWriting is commonly used for student newsletters and similar purposes.

Baby Sign

Main article: Baby Sign

In recent years, it has been shown that exposure to sign language has a positive impact on the socialization of hearing children. When infants are taught to sign, parents are able to converse with them at a developmental stage when they are not yet capable of producing oral speech, which requires fine control of both breathing and the vocal tract. The ability of a child to actively communicate earlier than would otherwise be possible appears to accelerate language development and to decrease the frustrations of communication.

Many parents use a collection of simplified or ad hoc signs called "baby sign", as infants do not have the dexterity required for true ASL. However, parents can learn to recognize their baby's approximations of adult ASL signs, just as they will later learn to recognize their approximations of oral language, so teaching an infant ASL is also possible. Typically young children will make an ASL sign in the correct location and use the correct hand motion, but may be able only to approximate the hand shape, for example, using one finger instead of three in signing water.

References

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2008)

^ Padden, Carol A. (2001). Folk Explanation in Language Survival in: Deaf World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook, Lois Bragg, Ed.. New York: New York University Press. pp. 107-108. ISBN 0-8147-9853-5.
^ Tennant, Richard (1998). The American Sign Language Handshape Dictionary. Clerc Books. ISBN 1563680432.
^ (2005), Downs, Sharon. Make A Difference. University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Barnard, Henry (1852), "Tribute to Gallaudet—A Discourse in Commemoration of the Life, Character and Services, of the Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, LL.D.— Delivered Before the Citizens of Hartford, January 7, 1852. With an Appendix, Containing History of Deaf-Mute Instruction and Institutions, and other Documents." (Download book: http://www.saveourdeafschools.org/tribute_to_gallaudet.pdf Saveourdeafschools.org)
Groce, Nora Ellen (1988). Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-27041-X.
Lane, Harlan L. (1984). When the mind hears: A history of the deaf. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-50878-5.
Padden, Carol; & Humphries, Tom. (1988). Deaf in America: Voices from a culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-19423-3.
Sacks, Oliver W. (1989). Seeing voices: A journey into the world of the deaf. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06083-0.
Stokoe, William C. (1976). Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. Linstok Press. ISBN 0-932130-01-1.
Stokoe, William C. (1960). Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf. Studies in linguistics: Occasional papers (No. 8). Buffalo: Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: American Sign Language

List of every ASL online dictionary (English) - (French)
American Sign Language (ASL) resource site. Free online lessons, ASL dictionary, and resources for teachers, students, and parents.
American Sign Language (ASL) video dictionary. Free online video dictionary of ASL signs.
The American Sign Language Linguistics Research Project
- Publications of the ASLLRP
- The Syntactic Organization of American Sign Language: A Synopsis (.pdf)
About ASL - article at deaflibrary.org
Ethnologue entry on ASL
Video Dictionary of ASL
Chimpanzees & Sign Language - article focusing on chimpanzee communication through sign language.
Some Cultural Info about ASL
Athabaskan Satellites & ASL Ion-Morphs
American Sign Language is a Foreign Language - a research/argumentative paper for the consideration of ASL to fulfill University foreign language requirements.
ASL Helper Type an English word, links to vocabulary sites. Vocabulary only; no syntax or grammar; some inaccuracies.
American Sign Language University-Lifeprint.com

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American Sign Language

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