A sign language widely used by the deaf in the USA; also known as Ameslan. The system contains over 4000 signs, and is used by over half a million deaf people - by many, as a first language.
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American Sign Language ASL |
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| Signed in: | United States, Canada | |
| Region: | Anglophone North America | |
| Total signers: | 500,000 to 2 million in the USA alone (others unknown) | |
| 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/FDIS 639-3: | ase | |
| sign language — list of sign languages — legal recognition | ||
American Sign Language (ASL; less commonly Ameslan) is the dominant sign language of the Deaf community 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 quite different from ASL, and not mutually intelligible.
ASL is also used (sometimes alongside indigenous sign languages) in the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, 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 and syntax are distinct from any spoken language in its area of influence.
History of ASL
In the United States, as in most of the world, hearing families with deaf children often employ ad-hoc home sign for simple communications. possibly the sign used by the indigenous nations of North America;
Standardized sign languages have been used in Italy since the 17th century and in France since the 18th century for the instruction of the deaf. Old French Sign Language (OFSL) was developed and used in Paris by the Abbé de l'Épée in his school for the deaf. These languages were always modeled after the natural sign languages already in use by the deaf cultures in their area of origin, often with additions to show aspects of the grammar of the local spoken languages.
American Plains Indians used Plains Indian Sign Language as an interlanguage for communication between people/tribes not sharing a common spoken language; Martha's Vineyard Sign Language was well known by almost all islanders since so many families had deaf members.
Congregationalist minister and deaf educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet is credited with popularizing the signing technique in North America. In 1817 they founded the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (now the American School for the Deaf), in Hartford, Connecticut, to teach sign language to American deaf students. Many of the school's students were from Martha's Vineyard, and they mixed their "native" sign language with Clerc's OFSL. Other students probably brought their own highly localized sign language or "home sign" systems to the mix. If there was any influence from sign language of indigenous people, it may have been here that it was absorbed into the 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. Many considered sign to not even be a language at all. In particular, ASL constantly adds new signs in an attempt to keep up with constantly changing technology.
Linguistics
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. While spoken languages are produced singularly by the oral cavity and are thus one-dimensional or linear (and can be written in linear patterns) as words are produced one at a time in a sequential order, ASL (like other natural sign languages) uses hands, head and body, with constantly changing movements and orientations, and is thus three dimensional.
Iconicity
Although it often seems as though the signs are meaningful of themselves, in fact they can be as arbitrary as words in spoken language. 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-signersKlima 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.
Generally, signs that are "Transparent" are signs of objects or words that became popular after the basics of ASL were established. Other linguists have since extended sign-language research to the morphology and syntax of ASL as well as other sign languages.
Phonology
Stokoe called the building blocks of signs 'cheremes', from the Greek cheir- 'hand' by analogy with the word phoneme. However, it has since been recognized that they are cognitively equivalent to the phonemes of oral languages, and since Stokoe's time the terms 'phoneme' and 'phonology' have been used for all languages, oral and sign.
These linguists have divided ASL signs into several elements or features: hand shape, hand orientation, hand movement, hand location, and non-manual features such as facial expression. while in many more recent approaches, movement is treated as the tempo of the language rather than as a feature per se: Signs are divided into segments of movement and hold, each of which consists of a set of the other features of hand shape, orientation, location, plus any non-manual features.
Orientation, movement, and hold
In addition to linear movement in the six fundamental directions of up, down, in (toward the signer), out (away from the signer), center (contralateral), and side (ipsilateral), of which diagonal movement is considered to be comprised, phonologically distinctive sign movements include twisting of the wrist, bending of the wrist or fingers, touching a location, crossing hands or fingers, grasping, entering (inserting the hand or fingers between the fingers of the other hand), opening the hand, closing the hand, approaching a location (or the hands to each other), separating from a location (or the hands from each other), brushing a location, wriggling the fingers, exchanging hands, and circling motion of the hand or arm.
When both hands are actively used for motion (as opposed to the 'weak' hand acting as a passive location for the 'dominant' hand), their motions may be parallel (both to the left or right), mirror images (approaching or separating), or alternating (180* out of phase, like legs pedaling a bicycle). Liddell (1982) divides signs into phonological segments, which may be either movements or holds. Liddell likens this to the division of spoken language into consonants and vowels, with the Stokoe approach likened to the division of speech into syllables. A sign may consist of just a hold (that is, it may be without movement), or of movement plus a hold, or a hold plus movement, or more complex sequences.
Handshape
While it can be approximated that there are around 150 handshapes, not all are phonemically distinct in ASL. The seventeen ASL handshapes that are considered phonemically distinct (not considering finger spelling) are:
the fist (the shape of the ASL letters A, S, T, or 10), the flat hand (the shape of B or 4), the spread (and sometimes clawed) hand (5 or E), the cupped hand (the C hand), thumb touching fingertips (as in O or M), a pointing index finger (as in 1, D, G, Z, or Q), a hooked index finger (the X hand), a pointing pinky finger (I or J), the index and middle fingers together (U, H, or N), the index and middle fingers apart (V or 2), the 'chopsticks' hand (K or P), the thumb and index finger apart (the L hand), the thumb, index, and middle finger extended (the 3 hand), thumb touching pinkie (6 or W), the 'okay' hand (thumb touching index: F or 9), crossed fingers (the R hand), and the pinkie with thumb and/or index finger, or a spread hand with bent middle finger (the Y hand, 8 hand, 'devil's horns', bent middle-finger, and 'I love you'/airplane hands are allophones).Fingerspelling
ASL includes both fingerspelling for 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. Several kinds of groups can be specified by handshape: When made with C hands, the sign means 'class'; Letter-incorporated signs which rely on such minor distinctions tend not to be stable in the long run, but they may eventually create new distinctions in the language. For example, due to signs such as 'elevator', which generally requires the E handshape, some argue that E has become phonemically distinct from the 5/claw handshape.
Location
Of all the possible locations on the body or in space, twelve are used to distinguish signs in ASL:
the whole face or head, the upper face (forehead or brow), the mid face (eyes or nose), the lower face (chin or mouth), the side face (cheek, temple, or ear), the neck, the trunk (shoulders, chest, and belly), the upper arm, the forearm (including the elbow), the inside of the wrist, the back of the wrist, and the other (weak) hand: In this case, the weak hand may take one of the simpler handshapes listed above, such as the A, O, B, G, H, V, or L handshapes, but not others such as X or R.In addition, the sign may be made in 'neutral' space in front of the chest (zero location).
For example, a 5 hand tapping the upper face means 'father', tapping the lower face means it 'mother', and tapping the torso (chest) it means 'fine'.
Signs may be made with two active hands, orientated in a specific way both to each other and to the body locations. However, no words are distinguished by such divisions of signing space.
A referent locus may be set up by signing a noun and then pointing to a certain spot in sign space. Perhaps as many as eight loci may be productively used to distinguish pronouns in a conversation, before the speakers become overloaded, whereas English is restricted to three third-person pronouns: he, she, and they.
Nouns can be set up without the need for initially pointing by making a sign for them at a salient point in space near the signer. (See below.) For example, when discussing football, you can sign 'college' on your left (most likely by signing 'college' in neutral space and extending the final hold to the locus you're setting up), fingerspell P-R-O at a locus on your right (that is, off to one side rather than in neutral space), and then ask whether one prefers collegiate or professional games by signing 'you like which?', with the indexic pronoun 'which' oscillating between the two loci.
Non-manual features
Non-manual elements are extremely important to ASL syntax, more important than intonation is to English syntax. For example, the sign translated 'not yet' requires that the tongue touch the lower lip and that the head rotate slowly from side to side, in addition to the manual part of the sign.
Degree
'Mouthing' (making what appear to be speech sounds) is important for fluent signing, and it has morphological uses. For example, one may sign 'man tall' to indicate the man is tall, but by mouthing the syllable cha while signing 'tall', the phrase becomes that man is enormous!
There are other ways of modifying a verb or adjective to make it more intense. Certain words which are short in English, such as 'sad' and 'mad', are fingerspelled rather than signed to mean 'very sad' and 'very mad'. Some signs are produced with an exaggeratedly large motion, so that they take up more sign space than normal. This may involve a back-and-forth scissoring motion of the arms to indicate that the sign ought to be yet larger, but that one is physically incapable of making it big enough. The fact that this modulation is morphological rather than merely mimetic can be seen in the sign for 'fast': both 'very slow' and 'very fast' are signed by making the motion slower and more deliberate than it is in the citation forms of 'slow' and 'fast', not by making it slower for 'very slow' and faster for 'very fast'.
Reduplication
Reduplication (morphological repetition) is extremely common in ASL. Generally the motion of the sign is shortened as well as repeated. It is also used to derive signs such as 'every two weeks' from 'two weeks', and is used for verbal number (see below), where the reduplication is iconic for the repetitive meaning of the sign.
Compounds
Many ASL words are historically compounds. However, the two elements of these signs have fused, with features being lost from one or both, to create what might be better called a blend than a compound.
An example is the verb 'to agree', which derives from the two signs 'to think' and 'to be alike'. The verb 'to think' is signed by bringing a G hand inward and touching the forehead (a move and a hold). 'Alike' is signed by holding two G hands parallel, pointing outward, and bringing them together two or three times. The compound/blend 'to agree' starts as 'to think' ends: with the index finger touching the forehead (the final hold of that sign). In addition, the weak hand is already in place, in anticipation of the next part of the sign.
One of these, transcribed as '-er', is made by placing two B or 5 hands in front of the torso, palms facing each other, and lowering them. This suffix cannot occur on its own, but must follow one of a limited set of verbs, which then together with it become the sign for the performer of the action, as in 'drive-er' and 'teach-er'.
An ASL prefix, (touching the chin), is used with number signs to indicate 'years old'. For instance, 'fifteen' is signed with a B hand that bends several times at the knuckles.
Numeral incorporation and classifiers
Rather than relying on sequential affixes, ASL makes heavy use of simultaneous modification of signs. another is numeral incorporation: There are several families of two-handed signs which require one of the hands to take the handshape of a numeral. There are analogous signs for 'weeks ago' and 'weeks from now', etc., though in practice several of these signs are only found with the lower numerals.
ASL also has a system of classifiers which may be incorporated into signs. A fist may represent an inactive object such as a rock (this is the default or neutral classifier), a horizontal Y hand may represent an aircraft, a horizontal 3 hand a motor vehicle, an upright G hand a person on foot, an upright V hand a pair of people on foot, and so on through higher numbers of people. These classifiers are moved through sign space to iconically represent the actions of their referents. For example, a Y hand may 'lift off' or 'land on' a horizontal B hand to sign an aircraft taking off or landing; a 3 hand may be brought down on a B hand to sign parking a car;
Frames
Frames are a morphological device that may be unique to sign languages (Liddell 2004). They are incomplete sets of the features which make up signs, and they combine with existing signs, absorbing features from them to form a derived sign. It is the frame which specifies the number and nature of segments in the resulting sign, while the basic signs it combines with lose all but one or two of their original features. It combines with the signs for the days of the week, which then lose their inherent movement. 'Monday' (that is, 'on Mondays') is therefore signed as an M/O hand that drops downward, but without the circling movement.
Verbal aspect
While there is no grammatical tense in ASL, there are numerous verbal aspects. 'To be just about to tell' retains just the locus and the initial chin touch, which now becomes the final hold of the sign; These frame features are: Eye gaze toward the locus (which is no longer pointed at with the hand), an open jaw, and a hand (or hands, in the case of two-hand verbs) in front of the trunk which moves in an arc to the onset location of the basic verb (in this case, touching the chin), while the trunk rotates and the signer inhales, catching her breath during the final hold. The hand shape throughout the sign is whichever is required by the final hold, in this case a G hand.
The variety of aspects in ASL can be illustrated by the verb 'to be sick', which involves the Y/8 hand touching the forehead, and which can be modified by a large number of frames.
Aspect is unusual in ASL in that transitive verbs derived for aspect lose their transitivity. That is, while you can sign 'dog chew bone' for the dog chewed on a bone, or 'she look-at me' for she looked at me, you cannot do the same in the durative to mean the dog gnawed on the bone or she stared at me. Instead, you must use other strategies, such as a topic construction (see below) to avoid having an object for the verb. in fact, such aspectual forms do not allow objects, as noted above.) There are specific dual forms (and for some signers trial forms), as well as plurals. while with plurals the object loci may be taken as a group by using a single sweep of the signing hand while the verbal motion is being performed, or individuated by iterating the move across the sweep. For example, 'to ask someone a question' is signed by flexing the index finger of an upright G hand is the direction of that person; the dual involves flexing it at both object loci (sequentially with one hand or simultaneously with both), the simple plural involves a single flexing which spans the object group while the hand arcs across it, and the individuated plural involves multiple rapid flexings while the hand arcs.
Syntax
ASL syntax is primarily conveyed through a combination of word order and non-manual features.
Word order
The basic constituent order of ASL is subject-object-verb.
ASL does not have a copula (linking 'to be' verb). For example, my hair is wet is signed 'my hair wet', and my name is Pete may be signed '[name my] P-E-T-E'. Topic constructions are not often used in standard English, but they are common in some dialects, as in,
In ASL, the eyebrows are raised during the production of a topic [mention how this differs from a question], and often a slight pause follows:
'[meat] I like lamb'As for meat, I prefer lamb.
ASL utterances do not require topics, but their use is extremely common.
Without a topic, the dog chased my cat is signed:
'dog chase my cat'However, people tend to want to set up the object of their concern first and then discuss what happened to it. In English, we do this with passive clauses: my cat was chased by the dog. In ASL, topics are used with similar effect:
[my cat] dog chase,or literally My cat, the dog chased it.
If the word order of the main clause is changed, the meaning of the utterance also changes:
[my cat] chase dogmeans my cat chased the dog (literally, my cat, it chased the dog.)
Subject pronoun tags
Information may also be added after the main clause as a kind of 'afterthought'. These are accompanied by a nod of the head, and make a statement more emphatic:
'boy fall'The boy fell down. versus
'boy fall [he]The boy fell down, he did.
The subject need not be mentioned, as in
'fall'He fell down. versus
'fall [he]He fell down, he did.
Aspect, topics, and transitivity
As noted above, in ASL aspectually marked verbs cannot take objects. type all-night'
The less colloquial topic construction may come out as,
'[my friend], [T-E-R-M paper], type all-night'Negation
Negated clauses may be signaled by shaking the head during the entire clause.
Rhetorical questions are much more common in ASL than in English. For example, I don't like garlic may be signed,
'[I like] [what?], garlic'.This strategy is commonly used instead of signing the word 'because' for clarity or emphasis. For example, the dog which recently chased the cat came home would be signed
'[recently dog chase cat] come home',where the brackets here indicate the duration of the non-manual features. If the sign 'recently' were made without these features, it would lie outside the relative clause, and the meaning would change to the dog which chased the cat recently came home.
Deixis
In ASL signers set up regions of space (loci) for specific referents (see above);
Pronouns
Personal pronouns in ASL are indexic. Both persons come in several numbers as well as with signs such as 'my' and 'by myself'.
Meier provides several arguments for believing that ASL does not formally distinguish second from third person. That is, the same formal sign can refer to any of several second or third persons, which the indexic nature of the pronoun makes clear.
ASL is a pro-drop language, which means that pronouns are not used when the referent is obvious from context and is not being emphasized.
Indexical verbs
Within ASL there is a class of indexical (often called 'directional') verbs. Two loci for a dog and a cat can be set up, with the sign moving between them to indicate 'the dog sees the cat' (if it starts at the locus for dog and moves toward the locus for cat) or 'the cat sees the dog' (with the motion in the opposite direction), or the V hand can circulate between both loci and myself to mean 'we (the dog, the cat, and myself) see each other'. The verb 'to be in pain' (index fingers pointed at each other and alternately approaching and separating) is signed at the location of the pain (head for headache, cheek for toothache, abdomen for stomachache, etc.). This is normally done in relation to the signer's own body, regardless of the person feeling the pain, but may take also use the locus system, especially for body parts which are not normally part of the sign space, such as the leg.
Time-sequenced ordering
ASL makes heavy use of time-sequenced ordering, meaning that events are signed in the order in which they occur. For example, for I was late to class last night because my boss handed me a huge stack of work after lunch yesterday, one would sign 'yesterday lunch finish, boss give-me work big-stack, night class late-me'.
Writing systems
ASL is often glossed with English words written in all capital letters. 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.
"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.
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.
Primate ASL Usage
ASL has been taught to both species of chimpanzee, the bonobo and common chimpanzee, as well as to gorillas, though to what extent they actually use it is debatable. Several of the animals have been said to have mastered more than one hundred signs, though there is disagreement about the primates' ability to sign. For example, the Washoe research team asked Washoe's handlers to write signs down whenever they witnessed them being produced by Washoe. The hearing signers on the team turned in long lists of signs while the only deaf native speaker of ASL on the team turned in a blank list, explaining that what she saw were not signs at all, simply gestures. The claim that non-human primates have learned ASL, or the extent to which they are capable of learning ASL or any other natural language, is not universally accepted by linguists — including some who accept similar but better-documented claims of rudimentary language acquisition by birds. Research on the ability of primates to learn sign language continues.
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