ASL

ASL, short for American Sign Language, is a visual-gestural language used primarily by Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities in the United States and parts of Canada, as well as by many signers around the world who study it as a second language. It is a natural language with its own grammar, lexicon, and conventions, and it is not a signed form of English.

ASL originated in the early 19th century through contact between Laurent Clerc, a Deaf signer from France who used French Sign Language (LSF), and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who helped establish the first school for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. The language developed from LSF and various regional sign systems, including Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, evolving into a distinct language with a rich cultural context and a growing Deaf community.

Linguistically, ASL conveys meaning through manual signs produced with the hands, facial expressions, and body movements. It relies on facial nonmanual markers, spatial grammar, and signing in the signing space to express tense, aspect, and relationships, with a topic-comment sentence structure common in discourse. ASL has its own syntax and morphology and is not simply a signed version of English. It borrows signs from multiple sources and creates new signs through established processes.

ASL plays a central role in Deaf culture and education. It is used in classrooms, interpretation, media, and daily communication, and it supports access to information and social participation for many Deaf individuals. There are regional dialects and variations, and debates exist around education methods for Deaf children, including bilingual approaches that emphasize ASL alongside written or spoken English. Estimates of ASL users typically range from several hundred thousand to over a million.