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:
“All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“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is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom,—it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.”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)
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)