American Sign Language (ASL) is a sign language, a language which uses the hands, facial expression, and body language rather than the voice. Like other sign languages, its grammar and syntax are distinct from oral languages such as English. In the 1960s, ASL was sometimes referred to as "Ameslan" but this term is now considered obsolete.
ASL is the predominant sign language of deaf communities in the United States and English-speaking parts of Canada. Although the United Kingdom and the United States / Canada share English as a common oral and written language, British Sign Language (BSL) is a completely different language from ASL, and they are not mutually intelligible. ASL is instead related to French Sign Language.
Besides North America, dialects of ASL or ASL-based creoles are used, sometimes alongside indigenous sign languages, in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Barbados, Bolivia, China, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica.
Read more about American Sign Language: Population, Variations in Signed English, History, Linguistics, Variation, Classifiers, Fingerspelling, Writing Systems, ASL and Baby Sign
Famous quotes containing the words american, sign and/or language:
“I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom,—it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be “revolutionary” but not transformative.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)