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 sign language, american, sign and/or language:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“If we define a sign as an exact reference, it must include symbol because a symbol is an exact reference too. The difference seems to be that a sign is an exact reference to something definite and a symbol an exact reference to something indefinite.”
—William York Tindall (1903–1981)
“Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)