Learn American Sign Language

HEALTH NEWS
Improving Health Through Research

About Sign Language

In the United States, as in most of the world, hearing families with deaf children often employ ad-hoc home sign for simple communications.

Today, though, many American Sign Language classes are offered in secondary and postsecondary schools. American Sign Language is a language distinct from spoken English—replete with its own syntax and grammar and supporting its own culture.

The origin of modern American Sign Language is ultimately tied to the confluence of many events and circumstances, including historical attempts at deaf education; possibly the sign used by the indigenous nations of North America; the unique situation present on a small island in Massachusetts; the attempts of a father to enlist a local minister to help educate his deaf daughter; and in no small part the ingenuity and genius of people (in this case deaf people) for language itself.

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 was developed and used in Paris by the Abbé de l'Epée 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; its influence on American Sign Language, if any, is unknown.

Off the coast of Massachusetts, on the island of Martha's Vineyard in the 18th century, the population had a much higher rate of deafness than the general population of the continental United States because of the founder effect and the island's isolation.

Martha's Vineyard Sign Language was well known by almost all islanders since so many families had deaf members. It afforded almost everyone with the opportunity to have frequent contact with American Sign Language while at an age most conducive to effortlessly learning a language.

Sign Language in North America

Congregationalist minister and deaf educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet is credited with popularizing the signing technique in North America.

At the behest of a father who was interested in educating his deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell, he was enlisted to investigate the methods of teaching the deaf.

In the early 1800s he visited the Abbé de l'Epée's school in Paris and convinced one of the teachers, Laurent Clerc, to return with him to 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.

It was at this school that all these influences would intermingle, interact and what would become American Sign Language was born.

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.

Undoubtedly, spontaneous lexicon developed at the school as well. 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 the modern sign languages in North America and France are approximately 60% shared whereas the vocabularies of American Sign Language and British Sign Language 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 this country there was a bitter fight between those who supported oralism over manualism in the late 1800s.

Many notable individuals of high standing contributed to this row, such as Alexander Graham Bell. The oralists won many battles and for a long time the use of sign was suppressed, socially and pedagogically. Many considered sign to not even be a language at all.

This situation was changed by William Stokoe a professor of English hired at Gallaudet University in 1955. He immediately became fascinated by American Sign Language

and began serious study of it. Eventually, through publication in linguistics journals of articles containing detailed linguistic analysis of American Sign Language, he was able to convince the scientific mainstream that American Sign Language was indeed a natural language on a par with any other.

The language continues to grow and change like any living language. Currently, as with spoken English, American Sign Language constantly adds new signs in an attempt to keep up with constantly changing technology.

Health Related Websites