What is American Sign Language?

American Sign Language (ASL) is a complete, complex, highly conceptual, visual-spatial language that employs signs made by moving the hands combined with sounds, facial expressions and postures of the body.

It is the primary language of the majority of D/HOH in the United States. It is the third most used language in this country.  It is also used in Canada and some parts of Africa.

It is a linguistically complete language that is constantly evolving as its users do, allowing for regional usage, idioms, slang, profanity, and jargon. Just as with other languages, specific ways of expressing ideas in ASL vary as much as ASL users themselves. Ethnicity, age, and gender are a few more factors that affect ASL usage and contribute to its variety.

For many ASL users, ASL is their first language. English is their second, non-native language. Currently, ASL has no written form, which means that there are no newspapers, magazines, or books written in ASL. ASL can, however, be translated into written English.

Facial expressions in ASL are rule-governed and express not only emotion, but also specific grammatical features. Eye gaze, head shift and body shift are also rule-governed.

ASL shares no grammatical similarities to English and should not, in any way, be considered a broken, mimed, or gestural form of English.

It was well into the 1970’s and 80’s before ASL was recognized as a fully functioning language.  Up until that point, the linguistic and educational communities considered ASL “bad English.

There are several common misconceptions about ASL. One misconception is that ASL is either a collection of individual gestures or merely a code on the hands for spoken English.

In fact, although ASL does use gesture, just as English uses sound, it is not made up merely of gestures, any more than English is made up merely of sounds. Individual signs are themselves structured grammatical units, which are placed in slots within the concepts being expressed according to grammatical rules.  

Another misconception is that signs are a form of fingerspelling. Signs are separate and distinct from "Finger Spelling" which is a manual system in which a hand configuration is used to represent a letter of the alphabet.

Although signers may finger spell in English letters, 98% of their signed communication is made up of signs, which are structured according to an entirely independent set of rules.

The history of ASL is rich and long. Its origins can be traced to the emergence of a large community of deaf people in the first public school for the deaf in France, founded about 1761. In 1817, a Deaf teacher from this school helped establish the first public school for deaf children in the United States (Padden, 1988).