American Sign Language

"ASL" redirects here. For other uses, see ASL (disambiguation).

"Canadian Sign Language" redirects here. For French Canadian Sign Language, see Quebec Sign Language.

American Sign Language
Langue des signes américaine (in the Canadian province of Québec)
Native to	United States, Canada
Region	English-speaking North America
Native speakers	250,000–500,000 in the United States (1972)[1]:26 L2 users: Used as L2 by many hearing people and by Hawaii Sign Language speakers.
Language family	French Sign-based (possibly a creole with Martha's Vineyard Sign Language) American Sign Language
Dialects	Black American Sign Bolivian Sign Costa Rican Sign Ghanaian Sign Nigerian Sign Francophone African Sign Québec Sign
Writing system	None are widely accepted si5s (ASLwrite), ASL-phabet, Stokoe notation, SignWriting
Official status
Official language in	none
Recognised minority language in	Ontario only in domains of: legislation, education and judiciary proceedings.[2] 40 US states recognize ASL to varying degrees, from a foreign language for school credits to the official language of that state's deaf population.[3]
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ase
Glottolog	asli1244  ASL family[4] amer1248  ASL proper[5]
Areas where ASL or a dialect/derivative thereof is the national sign language   Areas where ASL is in significant use alongside another sign language

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language^[6] that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in West Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has propagated widely by schools for the deaf and Deaf community organizations. Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken. Reliable estimates for American ASL users range from 250,000 to 500,000 persons, including a number of children of deaf adults. ASL users face stigma due to beliefs in the superiority of oral language to sign language.

ASL signs have a number of phonemic components, such as movement of the face, the torso, and the hands. ASL is not a form of pantomime although iconicity plays a larger role in ASL than in spoken languages. English loan words are often borrowed through fingerspelling, although ASL grammar is unrelated to that of English. ASL has verbal agreement and aspectual marking and has a productive system of forming agglutinative classifiers. Many linguists believe ASL to be a subject–verb–object (SVO) language. However, there are several alternative proposals to account for ASL word order.

Non-verbal communication

Nonverbal communication describes the processes of conveying a type of information in a form of non-linguistic representations. Examples of nonverbal communication include haptic communication, chronemic communication, gestures, body language, facial expressions, eye contact etc. Nonverbal communication also relates to the intent of a message. Examples of intent are voluntary, intentional movements like shaking a hand or winking, as well as involuntary, such as sweating.^[3] Speech also contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, e.g. rhythm, intonation, tempo, and stress. It affects communication most at the subconscious level and establishes trust. Likewise, written texts include nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, the spatial arrangement of words and the use of emoticons to convey emotion.

Nonverbal communication demonstrates one of Paul Watzlawick's laws: you cannot not communicate. Once proximity has formed awareness, living creatures begin interpreting any signals received.^[4] Some of the functions of nonverbal communication in humans are to complement and illustrate, to reinforce and emphasize, to replace and substitute, to control and regulate, and to contradict the denotative message.

Nonverbal cues are heavily relied on to express communication and to interpret others' communication and can replace or substitute verbal messages. However, non-verbal communication is ambiguous. When verbal messages contradict non-verbal messages, observation of non-verbal behaviour is relied on to judge another's attitudes and feelings, rather than assuming the truth of the verbal message alone.

There are several reasons as to why non-verbal communication plays a vital role in communication:

"Non-verbal communication is omnipresent." ^[5] They are included in every single communication act. To have total communication, all non-verbal channels such as the body, face, voice, appearance, touch, distance, timing, and other environmental forces must be engaged during face-to-face interaction. Written communication can also have non-verbal attributes. E-mails and web chats have options to change text font colours, stationary, emoticons, and capitalization in order to capture non-verbal cues into a verbal medium.

"Non-verbal behaviours are multifunctional." ^[6] Many different non-verbal channels are engaged at the same time in communication acts and allow the chance for simultaneous messages to be sent and received.

"Non-verbal behaviours may form a universal language system." ^[6] Smiling, crying, pointing, caressing, and glaring are non-verbal behaviours that are used and understood by people regardless of nationality. Such non-verbal signals allow the most basic form of communication when verbal communication is not effective due to language barriers.