AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE

American Sign Language

American Sign Language

Outline

This paper is based on the topic of American Sign Language. American Sign Language (ASL) is the principal language of the signing deaf community in the United States. There are estimated to be as many as 500,000 ASL signers, making it one of the most frequently used languages in North America. ASL, however, is only one of many sign languages used by deaf people around the world; deaf people in most countries have their own distinct sign language. Sign language is a means of communication through the use of body movements, gestures, and facial expressions. It could be described as plainly as pointing, shrugging, and grimacing or could be as complex as a combination of coded manual signals or signs. Beyond simply a means of communication, American Sign Language (ASL) is the primary language used by Deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the United States and in parts of Canada. It is the native language of many Deaf men and women, as well as some hearing children born into Deaf families.

This paper is divided into five sections each separated by a heading. The thesis statement comes first followed by an introduction section that summarizes the main ideas covered in this paper. The discussion section covers the major portion of this paper, elaborating the thesis statement and the ideas related to the topic. The conclusion section summarizes the whole theme of the paper.

Thesis Statement

We have many ways to learn American Sign Language by videos, charts, schools and online classes for all different ages.

Introduction

The history of ASL begins in the mid-eighteenth century in France. In 1755, Abbé Charles Michel de L'Épée (1712-1789) of Paris founded the first free school for deaf people, where the first sign language was developed. In 1815, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851), an American Episcopal priest, traveled to Europe to study methods of communicating with the Deaf. After several months, Gallaudet returned to the United States with Laurent Clerc, a Deaf instructor from the Paris school for the Deaf. In 1817, Gallaudet established the first American school for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, and Clerc played a primary role instructing Deaf children using sign language (Wilbur, 2007). The opening of subsequent residential schools for the Deaf throughout the United States promoted the standardization of ASL.

Discussion

ASL is a visual-spatial language based on concepts rather than words. It is a linguistically complete language, gaining recognition and acceptance as a genuine, formal language due in large part to the research done by an English professor named William Stokoe. Stokoe worked to legitimize ASL, proving scientifically and unequivocally that ASL meets the full criteria of linguistics phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics to be classified as a fully developed language (Stokoe, 2006). ASL shares no grammatical similarities to English and should not be considered in any way to be a broken, mimed, or gestural form of English. For example, ASL has a topic-comment syntax, while English uses subject-object-verb (Humphries, 2006).

Unlike many spoken languages that rely on word inflection, intonation, ...