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Lensbower.ĪSL emerged as a language in the American School for the Deaf (ASD), founded by Thomas Gallaudet in 1817, : 7 which brought together Old French Sign Language, various village sign languages, and home sign systems ASL was created in that situation by language contact. Travis Dougherty explains and demonstrates the ASL alphabet. However, there are several alternative proposals to account for ASL word order. Many linguists believe ASL to be a subject–verb–object (SVO) language. ASL has verbal agreement and aspectual marking and has a productive system of forming agglutinative classifiers. English loan words are often borrowed through fingerspelling, although ASL grammar is unrelated to that of English. ASL is not a form of pantomime although iconicity plays a larger role in ASL than in spoken languages. Reliable estimates for American ASL users range from 250,000 to 500,000 persons, including a number of children of deaf adults.ĪSL signs have a number of phonemic components, such as movement of the face, the torso, and the hands. Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken. Since then, ASL use has propagated widely by schools for the deaf and Deaf community organizations. It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.ĪSL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in West Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia.
FINGER SPELLING ALPHABET PSE MANUAL
ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by both manual and nonmanual features. Areas where ASL is in significant use alongside another sign languageĪmerican Sign Language ( ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada.
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