American Sign Language - Writing Systems

Writing Systems

For much of its history, ASL was not written. It was instead glossed with English words written in all capital letters. However, there is no one-to-one correspondence between words in ASL and English, and the inflectional modulation of ASL signs—a dominant part of the grammar—is lost.

Since in oral languages the elements of sound are for the most part produced linearly in time (that is, in a word like cat the a sound comes after the c sound, and the t sound comes after that), they can generally be easily written in a linear (one-dimensional) writing system such as an alphabet. There are only a few aspects which are produced simultaneously, such as tone in some languages, or vowel and consonant harmony, and which are therefore not straightforward to write with an alphabet. In sign languages, however, several channels operate simultaneously—hand shape, often with the two hands operating independently, hand location, hand motion, facial expression, mouthing—making an alphabetic script more complicated than just stringing letters together in the order sounds are produced.

In the 1960s linguist William Stokoe created the first writing system for a sign language, Stokoe notation, which he designed specifically for ASL. It is alphabetic, with a letter or diacritic for every phonemic (distinctive) hand shape, orientation, motion, and position, though it lacks any representation of facial expression, and is better suited for individual words than for extended passages of text. Stokoe used it for his 1965 A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, the first dictionary with entries in ASL—that is, the first dictionary which one could use to look up a sign without first knowing its conventional gloss in English.

The usage of Stokoe's system is currently restricted to academic circles. Several additional candidates for written ASL have appeared over the years, including Sutton SignWriting, Sign Script, ASL-phabet, and Si5s. Of these, only SignWriting has much following, being used, for example, in college newsletters.