The Collaborative International Dictionary
American sign language \American sign language\ n. a sign language, used in the United States mostly by the deaf or for communication with the deaf, in which gestures made with the hands symbolize words, alphabetical letters, or ideas, permitting rapid communication in the absence of speech.
Syn: Ameslan.
Wikipedia
American Sign Language (ASL) is 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 Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has propagated widely via schools for the deaf and Deaf community organizations. Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken, though 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, compounded by the fact that ASL is often glossed in English due to the lack of a standard writing system.
ASL signs have a number of phonemic components, including movement of the face and torso as well as the hands. ASL is not a form of pantomime, but iconicity does play 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, but there are several alternative proposals to account for ASL word order.
Usage examples of "american sign language".
My actual language specialty at Berkeley was American Sign Language, ASL.
Like Washoe the chimp teaching her child to speak in American Sign Language.
Matt, who's seven, is profoundly deaf' and communicates with American Sign Language.
Everyone else on the team more or less understood and used American Sign Language.
Sometimes I wasn't sure whether Ameslan, the American sign language, was her first or second language.
They communicate via Ameslan (American Sign Language), which they insist is a true language, complete with grammar, and they see the use of implants like cochlear implants as a threat to “.
Rhe used hand gestures as she made her response, almost like American Sign Language for the deaf.
When he lost his interpreters, Commander Data communicated with him through American sign language.