Variations in American Sign Language

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. If you need more evidence that language is constantly changing, look no further than American Sign Language, or ASL. Decades ago, people used to use those old-fashioned candlestick phones, and so the sign for telephone at that time was one fist at your mouth and another one at your ear, imitating what the phone looked like. And over time, deaf people adopted the sign that many hearing people use, too, that familiar pinky and thumb up to the side of your head, the one that looks like, call me.

But now that term is evolving again. And increasingly, people who use ASL will sign the word phone just by curving the fingers of one hand and holding it up to their ear like they’re holding an invisible cell phone.

And another thing that’s really interesting about how sign language is evolving is the fact that because there’s so much communication over video these days, a lot of times the signs that are used by younger people are shrinking to accommodate that smaller space on the screen, on the phone, or on the computer.

For example, instead of the old sign for dog, which is tapping your thigh as if to call a dog over to you, it’s just a flick of the fingers. It’s just signing the letters D and G, which doesn’t take up that much space.

It’s really fascinating to see how that is changing and developing. You mentioned the telephone sign switching from a two-handed sign to a one-handed sign. And that is, by the way, one of the very common ways that dialects of sign languages differ.

A lot of times there’ll be a two-handed sign and a one-handed version of it that can vary from place to place within the sign language community. And sometimes it’s done for expediency where a two-handed sign is difficult if you’re carrying something or if you are in a workplace and a one-handed sign is more necessary.

So a one-handed sign develops because of that. And then you talked about the signing space of an online video conference or online video presentation. The signing space also is something that commonly differentiates dialects.

So, for example, African-American sign language or black sign language tends to have a larger signing space, whereas non-black sign language tends to have a smaller signing space. And so you will see this as well being one of the places that even outside of language change, we can see these dialects forming just by looking at the signing space, how wide the horizontal and vertical space is.

And even where they put signs to temporarily hold them out of the conversation, they’ll literally take a subject and kind of temporarily move it outside of their signing space to go back and get it later, kind of like a referent.

Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating. Yeah, so it’s all very interesting. Yeah, it is interesting.

If you ever get a chance to see a linguist speak on sign language, do it, because they understand that the community is very interested and they’re interested in bringing in people to acknowledge that this is a real language with rules, it’s systematic, and people use it in everyday lives.

If you’d like to see some great talks and read some great papers written on sign language, look for the name Seal Lucas, C-E-I-L-L-U-C-A-S. She is an American linguist talking and writing and studying and explaining sign language to the community and teaching about sign language. And so she’s got some good stuff.

If you’d like to talk to us about language or share your ideas or thoughts, 877-929-9673.