Sign Languages

A signed language is not a code for a spoken one. It is a complete language that happens to live in the hands, face, and space rather than in sound.

When the linguist William Stokoe analyzed American Sign Language in 1960, he showed it has everything a spoken language has: a system of meaningless units that combine into meaningful ones, rules for building sentences, regional dialects, slang, registers, and the capacity for poetry, humor, and abstraction. Children exposed to a signed language from birth acquire it on exactly the same timetable as hearing children acquire speech.

One of the most common misconceptions is that there is a single, worldwide sign language. There is not. Just as spoken languages differ from country to country, so do signed ones, and they do not track spoken languages at all.

American Sign Language and British Sign Language are mutually unintelligible, even though both the U.S. and the U.K. speak English. ASL actually descends in part from French Sign Language, brought to the United States in 1817, so it has more in common with signing in France than in Britain.

Every sign is built from a small set of formational parameters. Change one, and you change the word.

• Handshape: the configuration of the hand.
• Location: where the sign is made.
• Movement: the path and manner of motion.
• Palm orientation: the direction the palm faces.
• Non-manual markers: facial expression, eyebrow position, head tilt, mouth movements that function as grammar.

Because the hands, face, and body work at once, signed languages are richly simultaneous and make heavy use of three-dimensional space.

ASL is the primary language of Deaf communities in the United States and much of Canada, used by hundreds of thousands of people. Its grammar is its own, not English word order on the hands.

ASL often organizes sentences around a topic first and a comment second. Many verbs are directional: the sign for give moves through space from the giver toward the receiver, building who-did-what-to-whom into the verb itself.

Alongside its vocabulary of signs, ASL has a manual alphabet: a distinct handshape for each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, formed mostly with one hand. Fingerspelling is used for names, places, brands, technical terms, and words that have no established sign.

It is a bridge between a signed language and a written one, not a replacement for either. Fluent signers fingerspell quickly and read it as shape and movement rather than letter by letter.

Scholars have documented well over a hundred distinct signed languages, grouped into families much like spoken ones.

• The French family: French Sign Language (LSF) and its descendants, including American Sign Language.
• The BANZSL family: British, Australian (Auslan), and New Zealand Sign Languages.
• Independent languages: Japanese, Chinese, and many others that arose on their own.
• International Sign: a flexible auxiliary system used at world congresses and the Deaflympics.

Learning a signed language is learning a language, with all that implies: vocabulary, grammar, and the culture that comes with it. The best teachers are Deaf, and the best practice is real conversation in the community.

If you are beginning, seek out Deaf-led classes, Deaf events, and content made by Deaf creators rather than relying on a dictionary of isolated signs.