| American Sign Language | |
|---|---|
| Signed in | United States, Canada |
| Region | Anglophone North America |
| Native signers | unknown, perhaps 500,000 or so primary users (2005)[1] |
| Language family |
French
|
| Dialects |
Black American Sign Language
Hispanic American Sign Language
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ase |
American Sign Language, or ASL, for a time also called Ameslan, is the dominant sign language of Deaf Americans, including deaf communities in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico.[2] Although the United Kingdom and the United States share English as a common language, British Sign Language (BSL) is quite unlike ASL, and the two languages are not mutually intelligible. ASL is instead related to French Sign Language.
Besides North America, ASL is also used, sometimes alongside indigenous sign languages, in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Barbados, Bolivia, China, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica. Like other sign languages, its grammar and syntax are distinct from any spoken language, including English.
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It is frequently, and wrongly, stated that ASL is the fourth- or fifth-most-spoken language in the United States.[3] These figures misquote a survey that actually concluded that ASL speakers constituted the fourth-largest population requiring an interpreter in court in 1972; several other languages were more widely spoken, but many of their speakers were bilingual in English.[1]
The 1972 survey was incomplete, and there has been no reliable estimate since. It only surveyed deaf people on whether they signed "well", it did not distinguish ASL from other sign languages, and it did not investigate how many hearing people among their friends and family, such as their children, might also sign. The 1972 data has been used to extrapolate an estimate that there were, at most, 500,000 home signers, both deaf and hearing, in the United States at the time, with an unknown percentage being ASL signers. The US population grew by 50% between then and 2010, and education for the deaf, including access to ASL, greatly improved. However, the number of profoundly deaf people in the country (approx. 2.5 million in the year 2000), a figure commonly given as the upper bound in ASL estimates, cannot be used, as the majority became deaf after age 65 and are unlikely to use ASL well, if at all.[1]
In the United States, as elsewhere in the world, hearing families with deaf children have historically employed ad-hoc home sign, idiosyncratic systems of hand gesture that do not amount to full language, for rudimentary communication. There were however exceptions, such as the community of Martha's Vineyard, where a large percentage of the population was deaf and the entire hearing population was able to sign a true sign language. Elsewhere the development of sign language required the emergence of deaf schools, which brought large numbers of deaf children together. The story of ASL begins with deaf education, Martha's Vineyard, and a minister, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who was enlisted by a father to educate his deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell.
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.[4] He created a series of grammatical signs to represent French grammatical markers (called "methodical signs") and taught those to his students so that they might learn grammatical French. 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, or langue des signes française.
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-20th century there were a high rate of genetic deafness on Martha’s Vineyard caused by the founder effect. It afforded almost everyone 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 Martha's Vineyard deaf community could be linked to The Weald, a small area in England, by way of Scituate, Massachusetts.
In 1541, 1688, 1740, 1805, and 1828, there 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. It was not a language strictly for deaf people but an integral part of the language along with spoken components. It was also a common language between tribes who had different spoken elements.[5]
In 1815, a Protestant minister, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, left his home in Hartford, Connecticut to visit Europe. Dr. Mason Cogswell had asked Gallaudet to investigate methods of teaching his deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell. 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 Abbé Sicard, director of the Royal Institution for the Deaf in Paris, and two of his students, one of whom 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 directors of Braidwood. 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 Abbé de l’Épée. Gallaudet persuaded Clerc to return with him to Connecticut and become a teacher for the deaf. Gallaudet and Clerc opened 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.
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.
After being strongly established in the United States there was a bitter fight between those who supported oralism over manualism in the late 19th century. 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. ASL was discouraged in schools for the deaf in many parts of the country at this time. Deaf teachers often were forced out of teaching to prevent deaf students from being exposed to sign language. Deaf children who did not progress adequately in oral programs were labeled "oral failures".[6] Many did not consider sign language to be a legitimate language. This was changed by William Stokoe, a professor of English at Gallaudet University hired 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 "language" on a par with any other.
The language continues to grow, adding new signs for changes in culture and technology. For example, there is a sign for INTERNET and a one for Video blog (the L hands, touching at thumb tips, rotate up from palm down to palm forward). Hip-hop has been signed on YouTube.[7]
ASL is a natural language, as proven to the satisfaction of the linguistic community by William Stokoe, and contains phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics just like spoken languages. Like other sign languages, it is a manual language and a visual language: information is encoded not in sounds but with the shape and movement of the hands and other parts of the body, and with facial expressions, including mouthing. Sign languages are commonly misunderstood as being gestural, but while gesture is used in sign languages just as it is in spoken languages (and indeed home sign is largely gestural), a sign language is fundamentally different from gesture in what it conveys and how it conveys it.
The topic of iconicity in signed languages is a sensitive one. According to Saussure, one of the most important tenets of a real language is that the mapping between form and meaning (sign and signifier) must be completely arbitrary. As a result, linguists have tried to downplay the role of iconicity in signed languages. Since the onset of the Cognitive Revolution more research has emerged showing that all languages, including spoken languages, have iconic tendencies. As a result, linguists are taking a second look at iconicity in signed languages.
A common misconception is that signs are iconically self-explanatory, that they are a transparent imitation of what they mean, or even that they are pantomime. Signed languages typically have a higher degree of morphophonological iconicity than do spoken languages (called mimesis or onomatopoeia), and pantomime does play a much more extended role in signed languages compared to spoken language.
In some aspects of signed languages, iconicity does not seem to play a significant role. Research on acquisition of pronouns in ASL (Petitto, 1987) [8] has shown that children do not always take advantage of the iconic properties of signs when interpreting their meaning. Petitto showed that when children were acquiring the pronoun ‘you’ the iconicity of the point (at the child) was often confused, and treated more like a name. This is a similar finding to research in spoken languages on pronoun acquisition.
Klima and Bellugi[9] devised three categories of explicitness in signs:
There are differences in degrees of iconicity across sign types. Classifiers are very iconic. There is a need for more research on this, since this is not a topic that researchers easily agree on.
ASL grammar is completely unrelated to that of English. It lacks the inflections of English, such as tense and number, and does not have articles such as "the", but its spatial mode of expression has enabled it to develop an elaborate system of grammatical aspect that is absent from English. ASL grammar was obscured for much of its history by the practice of glossing it rather than transcribing it (see Writing systems below), a practice which conveyed little of its grammar apart from word order.
When looking at variations it needs to be kept in mind that different groups of people do not always sign one way and not the other, rather they prefer and use a particular form of a sign more often. [10] Furthermore, each individual signer has their own style of signing depending on various factors, such as where they went to school, if they were mainstreamed (see Mainstreaming (education)), who taught them ASL, at what age they learned ASL, and how active they are in the Deaf Community. [11]
The American Sign Language used in different regions across North America reflects the spoken language around them. [12] This may include the speed of their signing and names for local places.[11]
According to The Canadian Dictionary of ASL [13] there are five broad regions of ASL variation in Canada, the Pacific, Prairie, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic regions.
Throughout these regions only lexical variations have been explored. For example the word learn can be signed two different ways. There is the standard way to sign the word learn that seems to be used by most signers of ASL in Canada, and there is also an Atlantic regional variation. Another example is about, which has three different ways of signing it; these are the standard way and two regional variations (Atlantic and Ontario). The videos on the right hand side of the page highlight the different ways to sign the word about. [13]
ASL has many regional and subcultural varieties and accents. "Just as there are accents in speech, there are regional accents in sign. People from the South sign slower than people in the North—even people from northern and southern Indiana have different styles."[14]
The most obvious regional difference is in local signs. For example, there are more than six signs for birthday in ASL, just as in English one can say couch and sofa, or soda and pop, to mean the same thing.[10]
According to Lucas, Bayley, and Valli, each sign has a handshape (see handshape section in American Sign Language grammar) and these handshapes can resemble signs of numbers or letters. Some signs that are created with a 1 handshape can also be made using an L or a 5 handshape (open handshape). There is a variation among regions in the United States when it comes to which handshape signers prefer to use. Signers from California, Missouri, Massachusetts and Louisiana favor the 1 handshape over the L handshape and open handshape, while signers from Maryland, Washington and Virginia prefer the L handshape and open handshape over the 1 handshape. [15]
Black sign language is influenced by African American English (AAE). This is especially evident in the younger Black deaf community, with use of signs for AAE words like my bad and whassup. [16] This is a language contact feature.
Black ASL evolved out of racial segregation in the United States, especially in the South. While White and Black children were both instructed in ASL, only Black teachers were permitted to instruct Black deaf children. [15] Black sign language was born out of this isolation. This isolation, as well as minimal adult input, contributed to the fact that Black Sign Language displays traditional sign language elements as well as the adoption of words used by younger hearing Black people. [17]
Black sign language speakers prefer to use two hands opposed to one, for example: remember. [16] Black sign language speakers are also more likely to sign higher on the body. A sign that may be lowered to the cheek level by an ASL speaker is more likely to be produced by a Black Sign Language speaker on the forehead, for example: teacher. [15]
The sign for rabbit provides a good example of variation between Black and White Signers. While both communities use the forehead location and neutral space location with the H handshape, Black signers also have a separate sign for rabbit, with a bent V handshape and different hand movement. [10]
Sign languages exhibit the use of polymorphemic constructions referred to as classifiers (not all researchers term these constructions classifiers). These constructions can convey shape, size, motion, location, movement, stative-descriptive, and/or handling information. These constructions are highly inflectable.[18] There have been few studies on how frequent classifiers are in American Sign Language (ASL) use. Ranging from 4.2% to 7.68% in a corpus study. The nature of classifiers and their constructions allows the signer to use them more frequently in narratives; one study found this to be 17.7%. [19] [20] Classifiers are highly iconic.
Fingerspelling as the main form of communication is known as the Rochester Method, also known as Visible English. The Rochester Method focuses on oral language and speech, spelling spoken words. It was the primary form of instruction at Rochester School for the Deaf.
For much of its history, ASL was not written. It was instead glossed with English words written in all capital letters. However, there is no one-to-one correspondence between words in ASL and English, and the inflectional modulation of ASL signs—a dominant part of the grammar—is lost.
Since in spoken languages the elements of sound are for the most part produced linearly in time (that is, in a word like cat the a sound comes after the c sound, and the t sound comes after that), they can generally be easily written in a linear (one-dimensional) writing system such as an alphabet. There are only a few aspects which are produced simultaneously, such as tone in some languages, or vowel and consonant harmony, and which are therefore not straightforward to write with an alphabet. In sign languages, however, several channels operate simultaneously—hand shape, often with the two hands operating independently, hand location, hand motion, facial expression, mouthing—making an alphabetic script more complicated than just stringing letters together in the order sounds are produced.
In the 1960s linguist William Stokoe created the first writing system for a sign language, the so-called Stokoe notation, which he designed specifically for ASL. It is alphabetic, with a letter or diacritic for every phonemic (distinctive) hand shape, orientation, motion, and position, though it lacks any representation of facial expression, and is better suited for individual words than for extended passages of text. Stokoe used it for his 1965 A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, the first dictionary with entries in ASL—that is, the first dictionary which one could use to look up a sign without first knowing its conventional gloss in English.
The usage of Stokoe's system is currently restricted to academic circles. A few candidates for written ASL have appeared in recent years, such as Sutton SignWriting, Sign Script, and Si5s. None have reached widespread usage yet, but the door is open for future acceptance.
In recent years, researchers have 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 vocal 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. Study results of more than 140 families were randomly assigned to two groups: signing and non-signing. Babies using sign language showed a three-month developmental advancement at 24-months, speaking like 27-month olds. At 36-months, they were developing like a 47-month old, showing a whole years advancement. By age 8, those who were signing as babies scored an average of twelve points higher on the WISC-III IQ test. (Drs. Acredolo and Goodwyn, babysigns.com)
Many parents use a collection of simplified or ad hoc signs called "baby sign." 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. Deaf children from deaf families will often "babble" in sign, just as their hearing counterparts babble in speech, making nonsensical hand gestures.
ASL has come a long way from its condemned days of banned use to being viewed as a grammatical language, which is the main form of communication in American Deaf culture. Many parents today purchase “Baby Signs” DVD’s and books which incorporate ASL signs for infant and toddler communication. “Baby Signs” was invented by Dr. Linda Acredolo and Dr. Susan Goodwyn in the early 1980s, and has become one of the newest trends in child development.
However, there is an interesting contrast between the belief that exposure of signs to a hearing infant will aid them in language development, whereas a deaf infant at times must show the inability to learn a spoken language before they are taught sign language. This thought had originated due to the idea that sign language hinders the development of a spoken language in deaf children (Mayberry, 2008).