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.