American Sign Language facts for kids
Quick facts for kids American Sign Language |
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| Langue des Signes Américaine (in the Canadian province of Québec) | |
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| Native to | United States, Canada |
| Region | English-speaking North America |
| Native speakers | 250,000–500,000 in the United States (1972) L2 users: Used as L2 by many hearing people and by Hawaii Sign Language speakers. |
| Language family |
French Sign-based (possibly a creole with Martha's Vineyard Sign Language)
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| Dialects |
African-American Sign
Bolivian Sign
Costa Rican Sign
Ghanaian Sign
Nigerian Sign
Francophone African Sign
Québec Sign
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| Writing system | None are widely accepted si5s (ASLwrite), ASL-phabet, Stokoe notation, SignWriting |
| Official status | |
| Official language in | none |
| Recognised minority language in | Ontario only in domains of: legislation, education and judiciary proceedings. 40 US states recognize ASL to varying degrees, from a foreign language for school credits to the official language of that state's deaf population. |
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Areas where ASL or a dialect/derivative thereof is the national sign language Areas where ASL is in significant use alongside another sign language
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American Sign Language (old names: Amslan, Ameslan ) is the most popular sign language for the Deaf in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in parts of Mexico. Although the United Kingdom and the United States share English as a spoken and written language, British Sign Language (BSL) is different from American Sign Language. ASL actually comes from French Sign Language, as Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet went to England for help learning sign language to teach to his deaf neighbors. He could not find anyone willing to teach him the British Sign Language, but did find some French people who were willing to help, he convinced one of them to travel back to the United States with him to set up the first deaf school in the U.S.
ASL is also used (sometimes with other sign languages) in the Philippines, Singapore, Dominican Republic, 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 is different from any spoken language.
ASL includes fingerspelling. Fingerspelling is a way to show the written letter. ASL uses one hand to show the English alphabet, although there are ways to show alphabets from other languages. Names of people and places can be fingerspelled. Fingerspelling is also used for words that have no sign, or for when people are confused about what a used sign means.
Contents
History
Prior to the birth of ASL, sign language had been used by various communities in the United States. As early as 1541 at first contact by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, there were reports that the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains widely spoke a sign language to communicate across vast national and linguistic lines.
In the 19th century, a "triangle" of village sign languages developed in New England: one in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; one in Henniker, New Hampshire, and one in Sandy River Valley, Maine. Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL), which was particularly important for the history of ASL, was used mainly in Chilmark, Massachusetts. Due to intermarriage in the original community of English settlers of the 1690s, and the recessive nature of genetic deafness, Chilmark had a high 4% rate of genetic deafness. MVSL was used even by hearing residents whenever a deaf person was present, and also in some situations where spoken language would be ineffective or inappropriate, such as during church sermons or between boats at sea.
ASL is thought to have originated in the American School for the Deaf (ASD), founded in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. Originally known as The American Asylum, At Hartford, For The Education And Instruction Of The Deaf And Dumb, the school was founded by the Yale graduate and divinity student Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Gallaudet, inspired by his success in demonstrating the learning abilities of a young deaf girl Alice Cogswell, traveled to Europe in order to learn deaf pedagogy from European institutions. Ultimately, Gallaudet chose to adopt the methods of the French Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris, and convinced Laurent Clerc, an assistant to the school's founder Charles-Michel de l'Épée, to accompany him back to the United States. Upon his return, Gallaudet founded the ASD on April 15, 1817.
The largest group of students during the first seven decades of the school were from Martha's Vineyard, and they brought MVSL with them. There were also 44 students from around Henniker, New Hampshire, and 27 from the Sandy River valley in Maine, each of which had their own village sign language. Other students brought knowledge of their own home signs. Laurent Clerc, the first teacher at ASD, taught using French Sign Language (LSF), which itself had developed in the Parisian school for the deaf established in 1755. From that situation of language contact, a new language emerged, now known as ASL.
More schools for the deaf were founded after ASD, and knowledge of ASL spread to those schools. In addition, the rise of Deaf community organizations bolstered the continued use of ASL. Societies such as the National Association of the Deaf and the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf held national conventions that attracted signers from across the country. All of that contributed to ASL's wide use over a large geographical area, atypical of a sign language.
Oralism, an approach to educating deaf students focusing on oral language, remained the prominent method of deaf education up to the 1950s. Linguists did not consider sign language to be true "language". Recognition of the legitimacy of ASL was achieved by William Stokoe, a linguist who arrived at Gallaudet University in 1955 when that was still the dominant assumption. Aided by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Stokoe argued for manualism, the use of sign language in deaf education. Stokoe noted that sign language shares the important features that oral languages have as a means of communication, and even devised a transcription system for ASL. In doing so, Stokoe revolutionized both deaf education and linguistics. In the 1960s, ASL was sometimes referred to as "Ameslan", but that term is now considered obsolete.
Statistics
Counting the number of ASL speakers is difficult because ASL users have never been counted by the American census. ASL use in the general American population has not been directly measured. The ultimate source for current estimates of the number of ASL users in the United States is a report for the National Census of the Deaf Population (NCDP) by Schein and Delk (1974). Based on a 1972 survey of the NCDP, Schein and Delk provided estimates consistent with a signing population between 250,000 and 500,000. The survey did not distinguish between ASL and other forms of signing.
Incorrect figures are sometimes cited for the population of ASL speakers in the United States based on misunderstandings of statistics. Demographics of the deaf population have been confused with those of ASL use. This accounts for cited estimations which are greater than 500,000. Such mistaken estimations can reach as high as 15,000,000.
ASL is sometimes incorrectly cited as the third- or fourth-most-spoken language in the United States. These figures misquote Schein and Delk (1974), who said ASL speakers constituted the third-largest population requiring an interpreter in court.
Images for kids
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The ASL phrase "American Sign Language", written in Stokoe notation
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The ASL phrase "American Sign Language", written in Sutton SignWriting
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ASL signs for counting
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Comparison of ASL writing systems. Sutton SignWriting is on the left, followed by Si5s, then Stokoe notation in the center, with SignFont and its simplified derivation ASL-phabet on the right.
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Two men and a woman signing
See also
In Spanish: Lengua de signos estadounidense para niños
