When did American Sign Language develop?
American Sign Language
ASL emerged as a language in the American School for the Deaf (ASD), founded in 1817. This school brought together Old French Sign Language, various village sign languages, and home sign systems; ASL was created in this situation of language contact. ASL was influenced by its forerunners but distinct from all of them.
American Sign Language phonology
Sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) are characterized by phonological processes analogous to, yet dissimilar from those of oral languages. Although there is a qualitative difference from oral languages in that sign-language phonemes are not based on sound, and are spatial in addition to being temporal, they fulfill the same role as phonemes in oral languages.
George Veditz
George William Veditz (August 13, 1861 – March 12, 1937) was a former president of National Association of the Deaf of the United States and was one of the first to film American Sign Language.
American Sign Language
In 2013 the White House published a response to a petition that gained over 37,000 signatures to "officially recognize American Sign Language as a community language and a language of instruction in schools". The response is titled "there shouldn't be any stigma about American Sign Language" and addressed that ASL is a vital language for the Deaf and hard of hearing. Stigmas associated with sign languages and the use of sign for educating children often lead to the absence of sign during periods in children's lives when they can access languages most effectively. Scholars such as Beth S. Benedict advocate not only for bilingualism (using ASL and English training) but also for early childhood intervention for children who are deaf. York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok has also campaigned for bilingualism, arguing that those who are bilingual acquire cognitive skills that may help to prevent dementia later in life.
Australian Aboriginal sign languages
Sign languages were noted in north Queensland as early as 1908 (Roth). Early research into indigenous sign was done by the American linguist La Mont West, and later, in more depth, by English linguist Adam Kendon.
Sign language
Until the 19th century, most of what is known about historical sign languages is limited to the manual alphabets (fingerspelling systems) that were invented to facilitate transfer of words from a spoken language to a sign language, rather than documentation of the language itself. Pedro Ponce de León (1520–1584) is said to have developed the first manual alphabet.
Old French Sign Language
Épée, however, influenced the language of the deaf community, and modern French Sign Language can be said to have emerged in the schools that Épée established. As deaf schools inspired by Épée's model sprung up around the world, the language was to influence the development of many other sign languages, including American Sign Language. From the dictionaries of "systematised signs" that the Abbé de l'Épée and his successor, Abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, published, we can see that many of the signs described have direct descendants in sign languages today.
History of deaf education in the United States
The history of deaf education in the United States began in the early 1800s when the Cobbs School of Virginia, an oral school, was established by William Bolling and John Braidwood, and the Connecticut Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, a manual school, was established by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc. When the Cobbs School closed in 1816, the manual method, which used American Sign Language, became commonplace in deaf schools for most of the remainder of the century. In the late 1800s, schools began to use the oral method, which only allowed the use of speech, as opposed to the manual method previously in place. Students caught using sign language in oral programs were often punished. The oral method was used for many years until sign language instruction gradually began to come back into deaf education.
Auslan
Australasian Signed English was created in the late 1970s to represent English words and grammar, using mostly Auslan signs together with some additional contrived signs, as well as borrowings from American Sign Language (ASL). It was, and still is, used largely in education for teaching English to Deaf children or for "discussing" English in academic contexts. It was thought to be much easier for hearing teachers and parents to learn another mode of English than to learn a new language with a complex spatial grammar such as Auslan.
English-language spelling reform
The second period started in the 19th century and appears to coincide with the development of phonetics as a science. In 1806, Noah Webster published his first dictionary, . It included an essay on the oddities of modern orthography and his proposals for reform. Many of the spellings he used, such as "color" and "center", would become hallmarks of American English. In 1807, Webster began compiling an expanded dictionary. It was published in 1828 as "An American Dictionary of the English Language". Although it drew some protest, the reformed spellings were gradually adopted throughout the United States.
History of sign language
The 18th permanent school for the deaf was established in Hartford, Connecticut; others followed. In 1817, Clerc and Gallaudet founded the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (now the American School for the Deaf). In 1864, a college for deaf people was founded in Washington D.C. Its enabling act was signed by Abraham Lincoln and was named "The National Deaf-Mute College" (later "Gallaudet College" (1894), and then renamed "Gallaudet University") in 1986.
Greek Sign Language
Greek SL formed in the 1950s when American Sign Language and French Sign Language came together, with admixture from indigenous sign.
Spanish Americans
Spanish was the second European language spoken in North America after Old Norse, the language of the Viking settlers. It was brought to the territory of what is the contemporary United States of America in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León. In 1565, the Spaniards founded St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest, continuously occupied European settlement in the modern U.S. territory.
Languages of the United States
The ACS does not tabulate the number of people who report the use of American Sign Language at home, so such data must come from other sources. While modern estimates indicate that American Sign Language was signed by as many as 500,000 Americans in 1972 (the last official survey of sign language), estimates as recently as 2011 were closer to 100,000. Various cultural factors, such as passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, have resulted in far greater educational opportunities for hearing-impaired children, which could double or triple the number of current users of American Sign Language.
Varieties of American Sign Language
Selangor Sign Language (SSL), also known as Kuala Lumpur Sign Language (KLSL), is a sign language used in Malaysia. It was originally based on American Sign Language (ASL) but has diverged significantly enough to now be considered a language in its own right. Kuala Lumpur was formerly located in the state of Selangor before it became a federal territory in 1974.
History of sign language
Until the 19th century, most of what we know about historical sign languages is limited to the manual alphabets (fingerspelling systems) that were invented to facilitate transfer of words from an oral to a sign language, rather than documentation of the sign language itself. Many sign languages have developed independently throughout the world, and no first sign language can be identified. Both signed systems and manual alphabets were found worldwide, and, though most recorded instances of sign languages seem to occur in Europe in the 17th century, it is possible that popular European ideals have overshadowed much of the attention earlier signed systems may have otherwise received. It was commonly accepted, for instance, that "the deaf" could not be educated; when John of Beverley, Bishop of York, taught a deaf person to speak in 685 AD, it was deemed a miracle, and he was later canonized Generally, philosophies linking (spoken) language and intelligence persisted well into the Enlightenment. Such hegemonic ideas may have prevented the recognition of histories of certain groups for whom sign languages were integral. Earlier than the 17th century, however, groups of Deaf people may have already lived together in communities, where even in small numbers they may have communicated through basic signing systems.
ASL interpreting
American Sign Language (ASL) is a language that uses signs, facial expressions, and body postures to communicate ideas. ASL is a rich, complex language on par with spoken languages, and employs rules of phonology, syntax, morphology, etc. using manual/visual modes of communication, where spoken languages rely on the oral/aural modes of communication. ASL is used by deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the North American continent, often as their primary language.
Lou Fant
Fant published nine books, and contributed to eight films promoting use of sign language. His "Ameslan: An Introduction to American Sign Language" (1972) was the first book designed to teach ASL as a unique language rather than as a mere lexicon of signs.
Languages of the United States
Although the languages of the Americas have a history stretching back about 17,000 to 12,000 years, current knowledge of them is limited. There are doubtless a number of undocumented languages that were once spoken in the United States that are missing from historical record.
Applied linguistics
In the United States, applied linguistics also began narrowly as the application of insights from structural linguistics—first to the teaching of English in schools and subsequently to second and foreign language teaching. The "linguistics applied" approach to language teaching was promulgated most strenuously by Leonard Bloomfield, who developed the foundation for the Army Specialized Training Program, and by Charles C. Fries, who established the English Language Institute (ELI) at the University of Michigan in 1941. In 1946, Applied linguistics became a recognized field of studies in the aforementioned university. In 1948, the Research Club at Michigan established "Language Learning: A Journal of Applied Linguistics", the first journal to bear the term "applied linguistics." In the late 1960s, applied linguistics began to establish its own identity as an interdisciplinary field of linguistics concerned with real-world language issues. The new identity was solidified by the creation of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1977.
Black American Sign Language
After the foundation and success of the American School for the Deaf, many other institutions for the deaf were founded throughout the country. Since schools, particularly in the South, were segregated, many Southern states created separate schools or departments for Black deaf children. The first school established for Black deaf children below the Mason–Dixon line opened in the District of Columbia in 1857; it remained segregated until 1958. The last Southern state to create an institution for Black deaf children was Louisiana in 1938. Black deaf children became a language community isolated from White deaf children, with different means of language socialization, allowing for different dialects to develop. Because the education of White children was privileged over that of Black children, oralism—the prominent pedagogical method of the time—was not as strictly applied to the Black deaf students. Oralist methods often forbade the use of sign language, so Black deaf students had more opportunities to use ASL than did their White peers. Despite the decision in "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954), which declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, integration was slow to come. Schools for the deaf were no exception: the last desegregated in 1978, 24 years after the decision.
Sign language in Singapore
While Singapore does not have a national sign language, the local deaf community recognizes Singapore Sign Language (SgSL) as Singapore’s native sign language. This is because sign language in Singapore has developed over the last 6 decades since the setting up of the first school for local deaf in 1954. Hence, there is crucial need to preserve and maintain local signs invented by the deaf community in Singapore since the early 1950s. Various sign languages have been adopted and used by the local deaf community as a result of linguistic changes. SgSL is influenced by Shanghainese Sign Language (SSL), American Sign Language (ASL), Signing Exact English (SEE-II) and locally developed signs. It also comprises different types of systems, including SEE-II, Pidgin Signed English (PSE) and gestures. Today, SgSL consists of the following language and sign systems:
American Sign Language
Sign production can also vary depending on age and native language. For example, sign production of letters may vary in older signers. Slight differences in finger spelling production can be a signal of age. Additionally, signers who learned American Sign Language as a second language vary in production. For Deaf signers who learned a different sign language before learning American Sign Language, qualities of their native language may show in their ASL production. Some examples of this varied production are finger spelling towards the body instead of away from, and signing certain movement from bottom to top instead of top to bottom. Hearing people that learn American Sign Language also have noticeable differences in signing production. The most notable production difference of hearing people learning American Sign Language is their rhythm and arm posture.
Manually coded English
The term 'Signed English' refers to a much simpler system than SEE1, SEE2, or LOVE. Signed English (occasionally referred to as Siglish) uses ASL signs in English word order, but only 14 grammatical markers. The most common method of Signed English in the US is that created by Harry Bornstein, who worked on the Gallaudet Signed English Project to develop children's books written in both illustrated signs and written English.
American Sign Language grammar
The grammar of American Sign Language (ASL) is the best studied of any sign language, though research is still in its infancy, dating back only to William Stokoe in the 1960s.
Sign language
A pidgin sign language arose among tribes of American Indians in the Great Plains region of North America (see Plains Indian Sign Language). It was used by hearing people to communicate among tribes with different spoken languages, as well as by deaf people. There are especially users today among the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Unlike Australian Aboriginal sign languages, it shares the spatial grammar of deaf sign languages.
In the 1500s, a Spanish expeditionary, Cabeza de Vaca, observed natives in the western part of modern-day Florida using sign language, and in the mid-16th century Coronado mentioned that communication with the Tonkawa using signs was possible without a translator. Whether or not these gesture systems reached the stage at which they could properly be called languages is still up for debate. There are estimates indicating that as many as 2% of Native Americans are seriously or completely deaf, a rate more than twice the national average.
American Sign Language
ASL is sometimes incorrectly cited as the third- or fourth-most-spoken language in the United States. These figures misquote Schein and Delk (1974), who actually concluded that ASL speakers constituted the third-largest population "requiring an interpreter in court". Although this would make ASL the third-most used language among monolinguals other than English, it does not imply that it is the fourth-most-spoken language in the United States, since speakers of other languages may also speak English.
James Smedley Brown
James Smedley Brown was a nineteenth-century educator of the deaf who is credited with the publication of the first dictionary of American Sign Language. He attended Oberlin College, and died in 1863.
American Sign Language
Although there is no well-established writing system for ASL, written sign language dates back almost two centuries. The first systematic writing system for a sign language seems to be that of Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian, developed in 1825. However, written sign language remained marginal among the public. In the 1960s, linguist William Stokoe created Stokoe notation 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 this system for his 1965 "A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles".
Trinidad and Tobago Sign Language
Trinidad and Tobago Sign Language (TTSL), sometimes called Trinidadian or Trinbago Sign Language (TSL) is the indigenous deaf sign language of Trinidad and Tobago, originating in about 1943 when the first deaf school opened, the Cascade School for the Deaf. It is not used in deaf education, which has been the domain of American Sign Language since about 1974, when a philosophy of Total Communication replaced previous Oralist approaches. A mixture of TTSL and ASL is used in Deaf associations, with TTSL being used more heavily in informal situations. The younger generation does not know the language well, as they only learn ASL in school, but teachers are starting to switch over to TTSL.
British Sign Language
Until the 1940s sign language skills were passed on unofficially between deaf people often living in residential institutions. Signing was actively discouraged in schools by punishment and the emphasis in education was on forcing deaf children to learn to lip read and finger spell. From the 1970s there has been an increasing tolerance and instruction in BSL in schools. The language continues to evolve as older signs such as "alms" and "pawnbroker" have fallen out of use and new signs such as "internet" and "laser" have been coined. The evolution of the language and its changing level of acceptance means that older users tend to rely on finger spelling while younger ones make use of a wider range of signs.
Black American Sign Language
Lexical variation between BASL and other dialects of ASL was first noted in the "Dictionary of American Sign Language." In a later study of 34 lexical signs, Black signers were found to have 28 signs that White signers did not know. Older signers are more likely to use variant signs than younger signers. Most of these signs, having been developed in segregated schools for the Black Deaf, refer to everyday life. Younger signers of BASL are less likely to use these variants, but when asked about them are aware that older signers have and use these innovative signs.
William Stokoe
Stokoe invented a written notation for sign language (now called Stokoe notation) as ASL had no written form at the time. Unlike SignWriting, which was developed later, it is not pictographic, but drew heavily on the Latin alphabet.
A Key Into the Language of America
A Key into the Language of America (also known as "A help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New England") is a book written by Roger Williams in 1643 describing the American Indian languages in New England in the 17th century, largely Narragansett, an Algonquian language. The book is the first study of an Amerindian language in English.
Filipino Sign Language
The Republic Act 11106 or The Filipino Sign Language Act, effective November 27, 2018, declared FSL as the national sign language of the Filipino Deaf.
FSL is believed to be part of the French Sign Language family. It has been strongly influenced by American Sign Language since the establishment in 1907 of the School for the Deaf and Blind (SDB) (now the Philippine School for the Deaf) by Delia Delight Rice (1883-1964), an American Thomasite teacher born to deaf parents. The school was run and managed by American principals until the 1940s. In the 1960s, contact with American Sign Language continued through the launching of the Deaf Evangelistic Alliance Foundation and the Laguna Christian College for the Deaf. Another source of ASL influence was the assignment of volunteers from the United States Peace Corps, who were stationed at various places in the Philippines from 1974 through 1989, as well as religious organizations that promoted ASL and Manually Coded English. Starting in 1982, the International Deaf Education Association (IDEA), led by former Peace Corps volunteer G. Dennis Drake, established a series of residential elementary programs in Bohol using Philippine Sign Language as the primary language of instruction. The Bohol Deaf Academy also primarily emphasizes Philippine Sign Language.
Manualism
While working at Gallaudet University in the 1970s, William Stokoe felt that American Sign Language was a language in its own right, with its own independent syntax and grammar. Stokoe classified the language into five parts which included: handshapes, orientation, location, movement, and facial expression, in which much of the meaning of the sign is clarified as well as the grammar of the sentence expressed. Some sign languages, such as American Sign Language, have been promoted as the traditional way of communication for deaf people. Manualism is combined with oralism as the contemporary technique for the education of deaf students.
Machine translation of sign languages
SignAloud is a technology that incorporates a pair of gloves made by a group of students at University of Washington that transliterate American Sign Language(ASL) into English. In the Spring of 2016 Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi, two hearing students form the University of Washington, created the idea for this device. Azodi has a rich background and involvement in business administration, while Pryor has a wealth of experience in engineering. In May 2016, the creators told NPR that they are working more closely with people who use ASL so that they can better understand their audience and tailor their product to the needs of these people rather than the assumed needs. However, no further versions have been released since then.The students' invention was one of seven to win the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, which seeks to award and applaud young inventors. Their invention fell under the "Use it!" category of the award which includes technological advances to existing products. They were awarded $10,000.
Plains Indian Sign Language
As most Native American languages lacked an indigenous alphabetic tradition, and as Plains Indian Sign Language was widely understood among different tribes, a written, graphic transcription of these signs is known to have functioned as a medium of communication between Native Americans on and off reservations during the period of American colonization, removal, and forced schooling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The letter of a Kiowa student, Belo Cozad, in 1890 sent to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania from his parents on a reservation in Oklahoma made use of such signs and becomes one of the only known indigenous written transcriptions of the Kiowa language.
Evangelical School for the Deaf
The kind of sign language used at the school varies due to the diverse population of students and staff. The types of sign language includes the following: American Sign Language (ASL), Puerto Rican Sign Language (PRSL), signed English, and pidgin signed English (PSE), known as contact signing. This is not a definitive list as research in the field of sign language linguistics is constantly making new discoveries and these categories of language frequently overlap.
Sign language in Singapore
SEE-II is a Manually Coded English system. It is a sign system that English Language visual through the hands. It was developed in 1969 in Southern California, USA with the aim of teaching deaf children English. About 75% to 80% of SEE-II signs are either borrowed from ASL or modified ASL signs. Unlike ASL, SEE-II is not a language but merely a mode of communication.
American Sign Language
However, American Sign Language does not appear to be vastly varied when compared to other signed languages. This is because when Deaf education was beginning in the United States, many educators flocked to the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. This central location for the first generation of educators in Deaf education to learn American Sign Language allows ASL to be more standardized than it is variant.
Fingerspelling
In American Sign Language (ASL), more lexical items are fingerspelled in casual conversation than in formal or narrative signing. Different sign language speech communities use fingerspelling to a greater or lesser degree. At the high end of the scale, fingerspelling makes up about 8.7% of casual signing in ASL, and 10% of casual signing in Auslan. The proportion is higher in older signers, suggesting that the use of fingerspelling has diminished over time. Across the Tasman Sea, only 2.5% of the corpus of New Zealand Sign Language was found to be fingerspelling. Fingerspelling has only become a part of NZSL since the 1980s; prior to that, words could be spelled or initialised by tracing letters in the air. Fingerspelling does not seem to be used much in the sign languages of Eastern Europe, except in schools, and Italian Sign Language is also said to use very little fingerspelling, and mainly for foreign words. Sign languages that make no use of fingerspelling at all include Kata Kolok and Ban Khor Sign Language.
The speed and clarity of fingerspelling also varies between different signing communities. In Italian Sign Language, fingerspelled words are relatively slow and clearly produced, whereas fingerspelling in standard British Sign Language (BSL) is often rapid so that the individual letters become difficult to distinguish, and the word is grasped from the overall hand movement. Most of the letters of the BSL alphabet are produced with two hands, but when one hand is occupied, the dominant hand may fingerspell onto an "imaginary" subordinate hand, and the word can be recognised by the movement. As with written words, the first and last letters and the length of the word are the most significant factors for recognition.
History of deaf education
American Sign Language (ASL) is used in both the United States and in English speaking parts of Canada. Although it is produced with gestures and seen with the eyes. Because ASL does not require the use of voice or the ability to hear, it is used by deaf people, as well as people who have trouble communicating through spoken language, whether due to physical limitations or due to intellectual disabilities. Sign language is not globally consistent; instead it is similar to other languages in that the signs used in various sign languages are regional and steeped in culture. 
Though English is spoken in both Great Britain and the United States, American Sign Language and British Sign Language are in fact rather dissimilar. ASL actually has greater similarity to French Sign Language because American Sign Language has its origin in French Sign Language, but today, they are distinctive and different from one another. A common misunderstanding is that ASL can be directly translated to the English language. This is false, because English and American Sign Language do not share the same grammar or syntax. Contrary to what has been presumed sign languages do have a specific format. They are not just different signs representing a word combined together to create speech. As oral languages have a particular format in which the words are presented, sign languages has its own format as well. Just as errors are made in the English language with a slight mispronunciation or mistaken letter arrangement, ASL can have the same errors with just a slight difference in gestures that are similar. This does not mean that grammar rules of oral language is in any way directly related to that of sign language, but the same concept can be taken into account. Although we can compare the processes of developing ASL with that of the spoken English language the difference between the two must be recognized. The qualitative factor of ASL is much different from English in form. The largely sequential phonetic structure of oral languages, with relatively few suprasegmental features, contrasts with a greater degree of simultaneity in sign languages. Sign languages have four simultaneously realized parameters: hand configuration, location, movement and orientation. Hand configuration, location and movement are what determine what is being signed. A simple combination of words can differ in just location, movement, or the way in which you hold your hand as you are signing.
Manualism
Back in the US, they searched for funds and public support. Together they established the first deaf school in the United States on April 15, 1817 in Hartford, Connecticut; it was named the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons. The school taught in French Sign Language and a version of de l’Épée's methodical sign taught by Clerc and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. The students attending the school had some knowledge of an indigenous sign language used in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Out of the blend of Martha's Vineyard Sign Language and French Sign Language, emerged American Sign Language.
Hawai'i Sign Language
Village sign use, by both d/Deaf and hearing, is attested from 1820. There's the possibility of influence from immigrant sign later that century, though HSL has little in common today with ASL or other signed and spoken languages it has come in contact with. The establishment of a school for the deaf in 1914 strengthened the use of sign, primarily HSL, among the students. A Deaf community hero, a Chinese-Hawai'ian Deaf man named Edwin Inn, taught HSL to other d/Deaf adults and also stood as president of a Deaf club. However, the introduction of ASL in 1941 in place of purely oral instruction resulted in a shift from HSL.
Nicaraguan Sign Language
William Stokoe, known by many as the father of American Sign Language linguistics, disagreed that the emergence of ISN is evidence of a language acquisition device. Stokoe also questions assertions that the language has emerged entirely without outside influence from (for example) Spanish or ASL. At present, there is no final evidence available to resolve the controversy surrounding nativism vs. cultural learning, and the dispute reaches far into theoretical linguistics, where approaches may conceptualize grammar in different and incompatible ways. Even if the evidence collected thus far seems to indicate a lack of access to Spanish and ASL in the early emergence process, it remains a possibility that the development of ISN is facilitated by the speaker's exposure to more general communicative strategies in early infancy.
French Sign Language Academy
The French Sign Language Academy, abbreviated ALSF, is a French association to promote French Sign Language (FSL). It was founded in 1979 by Guy Bouchauveau and Christian Bourgeois, the first president. It offers training in FSL and participates in research of the language in partnership with the International Visual Theater. The ALSF is an accredited training center for the "Diplôme de Compétences en Langues" (Diploma of Language Competence).
American Sign Language
ASL possesses a set of 26 signs known as the American manual alphabet, which can be used to spell out words from the English language. These signs make use of the 19 handshapes of ASL. For example, the signs for 'p' and 'k' use the same handshape but different orientations. A common misconception is that ASL consists only of fingerspelling; although such a method (Rochester Method) has been used, it is not ASL.
Machine translation of sign languages
SignAll is an automatic sign language translation system provided by Dolphio Technologies in Hungary. The team is "pioneering the first automated sign language translation solution, based on computer vision and natural language processing (NLP), to enable everyday communication between individuals with hearing who use spoken English and deaf or hard of hearing individuals who use ASL." The system of SignAll uses Kinect from Microsoft and other web cameras with depth sensors connected to a computer. The computer vision technology can recognize the handshape and the movement of a signer, and the system of natural language processing converts the collected data from computer vision into a simple English phrase. The developer of the device is deaf and the rest of the project team consists of many engineers and linguist specialists from deaf and hearing communities. The technology has the capability of incorporating all five parameters of ASL, which help the device accurately interpret the signer. SignAll has been endorsed by many companies including Deloitte and LT-innovate and has created partnerships with Microsoft Bizspark and Hungary's Renewal.
MotionSavvy was the first sign language to voice system. The device was created in 2012 by a group from Rochester Institute of Technology / National Technical Institute for the Deaf and "emerged from the Leap Motion accelerator AXLR8R." The team used a tablet case that leverages the power of the Leap Motion controller. The entire six person team was created by Deaf students from the schools deaf-education branch. The device is currently one of only two reciprocal communication devices solely for American Sign Language. It allows deaf individuals to sign to the device which is then interpreted or vice versa, taking spoken English and interpreting that into American Sign Language. The device is shipping for $198. Some other features include the ability to interact, live time feedback, sign builder, and crowdsign.
American English
The use of English in the United States is a result of English and British colonization of the Americas. The first wave of English-speaking settlers arrived in North America during the 17th century, followed by further migrations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since then, American English has developed into new dialects, in some cases under the influence of West African and Native American languages, German, Dutch, Irish, Spanish, and other languages of successive waves of immigrants to the United States.
Hawai'i Sign Language
Hawaiʻi Sign Language (HSL), also known as Old Hawaiʻi Sign Language and Pidgin Sign Language (PSL), is an indigenous sign language used in Hawaiʻi. Although historical records document its presence on the islands as early as the 1820s, it was not formally recognized until 2013 by linguists at the University of Hawai'i. It is the first new language to be uncovered within the United States since the 1930s. Linguistic experts believe HSL may be the last undiscovered language in the country.
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Thousands of languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of the 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus). Several indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems, the best known being the Maya script. The indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from the Quechuan languages, Aymara, Guarani, and Nahuatl, which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, indigenous and African languages.
African-American English
African-American English began as early as the seventeenth century, when the Atlantic slave trade brought African slaves into the majority-white culture of British-colonial North America in an area that became the Southern United States in the late eighteenth century. During the development of plantation culture in this region, nonstandard dialects of English were widely spoken by British settlers, as well as likely some creolized varieties, probably resulting in both first- and second-language English varieties developed by African Americans. The nineteenth century's evolving cotton-plantation industry, and eventually the twentieth century's Great Migration, certainly contributed greatly to the spread of the first of these varieties as stable dialects of English. The most widespread modern dialect is known as African-American Vernacular English.
Sign language in the brain
In one experiment published in 1992, visual mental imagery was studied in ASL signers—deaf and hearing—and hearing non-signers. These hearing signers were born to deaf parents, and ASL was their first language. Another aspect looked at in this study was the difference between native signers and those who learned sign language at a later age. In this experiment, native signers are considered deaf individuals who were born to deaf parents and therefore started absorbing the language in infancy. The other deaf signers' primary language is sign language, but they did not learn it until between the ages of two to sixteen.
Swedish Sign Language
Swedish sign language first came into use in 1800. It does not stem from any other languages. In fact, this self-created language went on to influence Finnish sign language and Portuguese sign language. 1809 marks the year of the first deaf school in Sweden. It was not until 1981 that Swedish Sign Language was recognized as a national language of Sweden.
Sign language
On the whole, though, sign languages are independent of spoken languages and follow their own paths of development. For example, British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of the United Kingdom and the United States share the same spoken language. The grammars of sign languages do not usually resemble those of spoken languages used in the same geographical area; in fact, in terms of syntax, ASL shares more with spoken Japanese than it does with English.
Varieties of American Sign Language
In 1973, American Sign Language was brought to Bolivia by Eleanor and Lloyd Powlison, missionaries from the United States. An indigenous sign language (or perhaps sign languages) existed before the introduction and adoption of American Sign Language, though it is unknown how widespread or unified it was.
Mexican Sign Language
LSM is widely believed by the deaf community to have derived from Old French Sign Language (OFSL), which combined with pre-existing local sign languages and home sign systems when deaf schools were first established in 1869. However, it is mutually unintelligible with American Sign Language, which emerged from OFSL 50 years earlier in the US, although the American manual alphabet is almost identical to the Mexican one. Spanish Sign Language used in Spain is different from Mexican Sign Language, though LSM may have been influenced by it.
Maritime Sign Language
Maritime Sign Language (MSL), is a sign language descended from British Sign Language and used in Canada's Atlantic provinces. It was created through the convergence of deaf communities from the Northeastern United States and the United Kingdom immigrating to Canada throughout the 1700s and 1800s. It is unknown the extent to which this language is spoken today, though there are linguistic communities found across the Atlantic provinces. MSL is being supplanted by American Sign Language (ASL) resulting in fewer MSL speakers and a lack of resources (education, interpretation, etc.) for MSL speakers.
English language
A major feature in the early development of Modern English was the codification of explicit norms for standard usage, and their dissemination through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications. In 1755 Samuel Johnson published his "A Dictionary of the English Language" which introduced a standard set of spelling conventions and usage norms. In 1828, Noah Webster published the "American Dictionary of the English language" in an effort to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent from the British standard. Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes.
Henniker, New Hampshire
In the 19th century Henniker had a high rate of congenital deafness, and its own sign language, which may have played a significant role in the emergence of American Sign Language.
French Sign Language family
The FSL family descends from Old French Sign Language, which developed among the deaf community in Paris. The earliest mention of Old French Sign Language is by the abbé Charles-Michel de l'Épée in the late 17th century, but it could have existed for centuries prior. Several European sign languages, such as Russian Sign Language, derive from it, as does American Sign Language, established when French educator Laurent Clerc taught his language at the American School for the Deaf. Others, such as Spanish Sign Language, are thought to be related to French Sign Language even if they are not directly descendant from it.
Manually coded English
Developed in the US in 1966 by a deaf teacher named David Anthony, Signing Essential English (SEE1) was intended to teach proper grammatical construction by using signs borrowed from ASL but it implements English word order, and other grammatical markers, such as conjugation. In SEE1, all compound words are formed as separate signs - instead of using the ASL sign for butterfly, SEE1 places the signs for butter and fly in sequential order. Many signs from ASL are initialized in SEE1 – the ASL sign for have is signed with the B handshape in SEE1. Grammatical markers also have signs of their own, including the -ing ending and articles such as the, which are not typically included in ASL. SEE1 is occasionally referred to as Morphemic Sign System (MSS), and it has also been adapted in Poland into seeing essential Polish. Note:
SEE1/MSS has evolved to be more compatible with written and spoken English. Much of this has been under the guidance of Dr. Wanda Milburn and the Amarillo ISD.
Sign language
The first studies on iconicity in ASL were published in the late 1970s, and early 1980s. Many early sign language linguists rejected the notion that iconicity was an important aspect of the language. Though they recognized that certain aspects of the language seemed iconic, they considered this to be merely extralinguistic, a property which did not influence the language. However, mimetic aspects of sign language (signs that imitate, mimic, or represent) are found in abundance across a wide variety of sign languages. For example, deaf children learning sign language try to express something but do not know the associated sign, they will often invent an iconic sign that displays mimetic properties. Though it never disappears from a particular sign language, iconicity is gradually weakened as forms of sign languages become more customary and are subsequently grammaticized. As a form becomes more conventional, it becomes disseminated in a methodical way phonologically to the rest of the sign language community. Frishberg (1975) wrote a very influential paper addressing the relationship between arbitrariness and iconicity in ASL. She concluded that though originally present in many signs, iconicity is degraded over time through the application of grammatical processes. In other words, over time, the natural processes of regularization in the language obscures any iconically motivated features of the sign.
History of sign language
In Native American communities prior to 1492, for instance, it seems one or more signed systems existed as a lingua franca which neighboring tribes used to communicate with one another Native American communities believed people born deaf were physically and mentally capable, while people in Europe, starting with the urging of Pedro Ponce de León, would not begin to believe so until the late 16th century. Accounts of such signing indicate these languages were fairly complex, as ethnographers such as Cabeza de Vaca described detailed communications between them and Native Americans that were conducted in sign. A number of Martha's Vineyard settlers from a community in Kent, England, for instance, seemed to be carriers of deaf genes, leading to a high density of deaf individuals on the island from the 1700s, being the highest around 1840. This environment proved ideal for the development of what is today known as Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, which was used by hearing and deaf islanders alike. Years earlier, their Kentish ancestors, too, may have had a number of deaf community members and developed their own signing system as well.
Signing Exact English
Signing Exact English ("SEE-II", sometimes Signed Exact English) is a system of manual communication that strives to be an exact representation of English vocabulary and grammar. It is one of a number of such systems in use in English-speaking countries. It is related to Seeing Essential English (SEE-I), a manual sign system created in 1971, based on the morphemes of English words. SEE-II models much of its sign vocabulary from American Sign Language (ASL), but modifies the handshapes used in ASL in order to use the handshape of the first letter of the corresponding English word. The four components of signs are handshape (static or dynamic), orientation (the direction of the palm), location (where the sign is performed relative to the body), and movement (trajectory shape, trajectory size, direction of motion, and planar orientation).
SignWriting
Sutton SignWriting, or simply, SignWriting, is a system of writing sign languages. It is highly featural and visually iconic, both in the shapes of the characters, which are abstract pictures of the hands, face, and body, and in their spatial arrangement on the page, which does not follow a sequential order like the letters that make up written English words. It was developed in 1974 by Valerie Sutton, a dancer who had, two years earlier, developed DanceWriting.
American Sign Language
The largest group of students during the first seven decades of the school were from Martha's Vineyard, and they brought MVSL with them. There were also 44 students from around Henniker, New Hampshire, and 27 from the Sandy River valley in Maine, each of which had their own village sign language. Other students brought knowledge of their own home signs. Laurent Clerc, the first teacher at ASD, taught using French Sign Language (LSF), which itself had developed in the Parisian school for the deaf established in 1755. From this situation of language contact, a new language emerged, now known as ASL.
More schools for the deaf were founded after ASD, and knowledge of ASL spread to these schools. In addition, the rise of Deaf community organizations bolstered the continued use of ASL. Societies such as the National Association of the Deaf and the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf held national conventions that attracted signers from across the country. This all contributed to ASL's wide use over a large geographical area, atypical of a sign language.
Manually coded English
Signing exact English (SEE2) was developed by Gerilee Gustason, Esther Zawolkow, and Donna Pfetzing in the early 1970s. As an offshoot of SEE1, many features of SEE2 are identical to that code system. Initializations and grammatical markers are also used in SEE2, but compound words with an equivalent ASL sign are used as the ASL sign, as with butterfly. SEE2 is also used in Singapore. About 75% to 80% of SEE2 signs are either borrowed from ASL or are modified ASL signs.
Signing Exact English uses more markers than the 14 used in Signed English.
Varieties of American Sign Language
Greek SL formed in the 1950s when American Sign Language and French Sign Language came together, with admixture from indigenous sign.
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language 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.
American Sign Language literature
Every spoken language used today originated in a pre-written, or oral form. Because no widely accepted method has yet developed for recording American Sign Language in writing, it persists as a purely "visual" language. Only with the advent of film technology in the early 20th century could ASL be recorded, preserved, and distributed. The earliest example of recorded signing is a National Association of the Deaf compilation from between 1910 and 1920, containing various types of ASL discourse, including lectures, poems, stories, and songs.
Hearing loss
Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Épée opened the first school for the deaf in Paris at the deaf school. The American Thomas Gallaudet witnessed a demonstration of deaf teaching skills from Épée's successor Abbé Sicard and two of the school's deaf faculty members, Laurent Clerc and Jean Massieu; accompanied by Clerc, he returned to the United States, where in 1817 they founded American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. American Sign Language (ASL) started to evolve from primarily French Sign Language (LSF), and other outside influences.
Black American Sign Language
Black American Sign Language (BASL) or Black Sign Variation (BSV) is a dialect of American Sign Language (ASL) used most commonly by deaf African Americans in the United States. The divergence from ASL was influenced largely by the segregation of schools in the American South. Like other schools at the time, schools for the deaf were segregated based upon race, creating two language communities among deaf signers: White deaf signers at White schools and Black deaf signers at Black schools. Today, BASL is still used by signers in the South despite public schools having been legally desegregated since 1954.
Nicaraguan Sign Language
Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; ) is a sign language that was largely spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. It is of particular interest to the linguists who study it, because it offers a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new language.
American Sign Language
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.
Plains Indian Sign Language
Plains Sign Talk's antecedents, if any, are unknown, due to lack of written records. But, the earliest records of contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the time of the Europeans' arrival there. These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541.
Providence Island Sign Language
It is believed that the sign language emerged in the late 19th or early 20th century. Brief sociological studies have suggested that deaf people on the island are regarded as inferior in mental ability; hearing people do not discuss complex ideas with them, and they hold a marginalized social position. Perhaps consequently, PISL is rather simplistic in comparison to other sign languages. Another possibility for the state of the language is that few deaf people communicate directly, meaning that almost all signing is mediated by the hearing population.
William Stokoe
Stokoe researched American Sign Language (ASL) extensively while he worked at Gallaudet University. He coined the term cherology, the equivalent of phonology for sign language. However, sign language linguists, of which he was the first, now generally use the term "phonology" for signed languages.
American Sign Language
Most popularly there are variants of the signs for English words such as "birthday", "pizza", "Halloween", "early", and "soon". These are just a sample of the most commonly recognized signs with variant based on regional change. The sign for "school" is commonly varied between black and white signers. The variation between sign produced by black and white signers is sometimes referred to as Black American Sign Language.
William Stokoe
From 1955 to 1970 he served as a professor and chairman of the English department at Gallaudet University, after being recruited to the position by his friend and former classmate Dean George Detmold. He published "Sign Language Structure" (1960) and co-authored along with Dorothy C. Casterline and Carl G. Croneberg, "A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles" (1965). The former was the first place the term "American sign language" was ever formally used. (The fully capitalized version: "American Sign Language," first appeared in the Buff and Blue in October 1963.) He also started the academic journal "Sign Language Studies" in 1972, which he edited until 1996. He established Linstok Press, an academic publishing company, to facilitate the journal's publication. Stokoe's final book, "Language in Hand", was published in 2001, after his death.
International auxiliary language
An international auxiliary sign language has been developed by deaf people who meet regularly at international forums such as sporting events or in political organisations. Previously referred to as Gestuno but now more commonly known simply as 'international sign', the language has continued to develop since the first signs were standardised in 1973, and it is now in widespread use. International sign is distinct in many ways from spoken IALs; many signs are iconic and signers tend to insert these signs into the grammar of their own sign language, with an emphasis on visually intuitive gestures and mime. A simple sign language called Plains Indian Sign Language was used by indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Languages of the United States
A sign-language trade pidgin, known as Plains Indian Sign Language, Plains Standard or Plains Sign Talk, arose among the Native Americans of the plains. Each signing nation had a separate signed version of their oral language, that was used by the hearing, and these were not mutually intelligible. Plains Standard was used to communicate between these nations. It seems to have started in Texas and then spread north, through the Great Plains, as far as British Columbia. There are still a few users today, especially among the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Unlike other sign languages developed by hearing people, it shares the spatial grammar of deaf sign languages. Through intergenerational transmission, Plains Sign Talk became a working language still in use today in some Deaf First Nations or Native American communities.
Auslan
In more recent times Auslan has seen a significant amount of lexical borrowing from American Sign Language (ASL), especially in signs for technical terms. Some of these arose from the signed English educational philosophies of the 1970s and 80s, when a committee looking for signs with direct equivalence to English words found them in ASL and/or in invented English-based signed systems used in North America and introduced them in the classroom. ASL contains many signs initialised from an alphabet which was also derived from LSF, and Auslan users, already familiar with the related ISL alphabet, accepted many of the new signs easily.
Languages of the United States
Henniker Sign Language is now extinct but was once found around the Henniker region of New Hampshire and formed a basis for American Sign Language.
Manually coded English
In Australia, 'Signed English' was developed by a committee in the late 1970s, who took signs from Auslan (especially the southern dialect), invented new signs, and borrowed a number of signs from American Sign Language that have now made their way into everyday use in Auslan. It is still used in many schools. Australasian Signed English is also in use in New Zealand.
Sign language in Singapore
American Sign Language (ASL) was introduced to Singapore’s deaf community by Lim Chin Heng, in 1974. Lim Chin Heng was instructed by Peng Tsu Ying and additionally studied English and ASL at Gallaudet University in the United States. During that period, mainstream education in Singapore shifted from a diverse to a uniform language teaching system. English was promoted as the language of instruction in Singaporean schools, and therefore ASL served as a medium of instruction. ASL is still used in Singapore today.
American Sign Language
Each sign in ASL is composed of a number of distinctive components, generally referred to as parameters. A sign may use one hand or both. All signs can be described using the five parameters involved in signed languages, which are handshape, movement, palm orientation, location and non-manual markers. Just as phonemes of sound distinguish meaning in spoken languages, these parameters are the phonemes that distinguish meaning in signed languages like ASL. Changing any one of these may change the meaning of a sign, as illustrated by the ASL signs THINK and DISAPPOINTED:
There are also meaningful non-manual signals in ASL. This may include movement of the eyebrows, the cheeks, the nose, the head, the torso, and the eyes.
Spanish language in the United States
The Spanish language has been present in what is now the United States since the 15th century, with the arrival of Spanish colonization in North America. Colonizers settled in areas that would later become the states of Florida, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, as well as the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The Spanish explorers explored areas of 42 future U.S. states leaving behind a varying range of Hispanic legacy in the North American continent. Western regions of the Louisiana Territory were also under Spanish rule between 1763 and 1800, after the French and Indian War, further extending the Spanish influence throughout the modern-day United States of America.
Cued speech
Cued Speech was invented in 1966 by R. Orin Cornett at Gallaudet College, Washington, D.C. After discovering that children with prelingual and profound hearing impairments typically have poor reading comprehension, he developed the system with the aim of improving the reading abilities of such children through better comprehension of the phonemes of English. At the time, some were arguing that deaf children were earning these lower marks because they had to learn two different systems: American Sign Language (ASL) for person-to-person communication and English for reading and writing. As many sounds look identical on the lips (such as and ), the hand signals introduce a visual contrast in place of the formerly acoustic contrast. Cued Speech may also help people hearing incomplete or distorted sound—according to the National Cued Speech Association at cuedspeech.org, "cochlear implants and Cued Speech are powerful partners".
Black American Sign Language
Like many educational institutions for hearing children during the 1800s and early 1900s, schools for deaf children were segregated based on race. The first school for the deaf in the United States, the American School for the Deaf (ASD), was founded in 1817 but did not admit any Black students until 1952. Of the schools for the deaf that were founded, few admitted students of color. Seeing a lack of educational opportunities for Black deaf children, Platt Skinner founded the Skinner School for the Colored Deaf, Dumb, and Blind in 1856 in Niagara Falls, New York. Skinner described his school as "the first effort of its kind in the country ... We receive and instruct those and only those who are refused admission to all other institutions and are despised on account of their color." The school moved to Trenton, New Jersey, in 1860. After it closed in 1866, no Northern state created an institution for Black deaf children. Even after these states outlawed segregation by 1900, integration was sparse, as some institutions allowed Black students and others did not.
Varieties of American Sign Language
FSL is believed to be part of the French Sign Language family. It has been strongly influenced by American Sign Language since the establishment in 1907 of the School for the Deaf and Blind (SDB) (now the Philippine School for the Deaf) by Delia Delight Rice (1883-1964), an American Thomasite teacher born to deaf parents. The school was run and managed by American principals until the 1940s. In the 1960s, contact with American Sign Language continued through the launching of the Deaf Evangelistic Alliance Foundation and the Laguna Christian College for the Deaf. Another source of ASL influence was the assignment of volunteers from the United States Peace Corps, who were stationed at various places in the Philippines from 1974 through 1989, as well as religious organizations that promoted ASL and Manually Coded English. Starting in 1982, the International Deaf Education Association (IDEA), led by former Peace Corps volunteer G. Dennis Drake, established a series of residential elementary programs in Bohol using Philippine Sign Language as the primary language of instruction. The Bohol Deaf Academy also primarily emphasizes Philippine Sign Language.
Sign language
The Critical Period hypothesis suggests that language, spoken or signed, is more easily acquired as a child at a young age versus an adult because of the plasticity of the child's brain. In a study done at the University of McGill, they found that American Sign Language users who acquired the language natively (from birth) performed better when asked to copy videos of ASL sentences than ASL users who acquired the language later in life. They also found that there are differences in the grammatical morphology of ASL sentences between the two groups, all suggesting that there is a very important critical period in learning signed languages.
American Sign Language literature
The National Theatre of the Deaf originated in 1967 and performs both classic and original works in American Sign Language.
Varieties of American Sign Language
Moroccan Sign Language was created by American Peace Corps volunteers in Tetouan c. 1987, from American Sign Language (ASL) and existing signs; there is less than a 50% lexical similarity with ASL. It is not clear if the 'existing signs' were home sign or an established village sign language. The language is used in three programs for the deaf, but not throughout the country: It is not used in the large cities of Rabat, Tangier, or Casa Blanca, for example. In Oujda, near the Algerian border, Algerian Sign Language is used, or at least the local sign language has been strongly influenced by it.
Varieties of American Sign Language
Dominican Sign Language is a local variant of American Sign Language used in the Dominican Republic. Many deaf Dominicans use home sign, and are not fluent in Dominican Sign Language.
Francophone African Sign Language ("Langue des Signes d'Afrique Francophone", or LSAF) is the variety, or varieties, of American Sign Language (ASL) used in several francophone countries of Africa. Education for the Deaf in these countries is based on ASL and written French; there is therefore a French influence on the language of the classroom.
Nicaraguan Sign Language
Staff at the school, unaware of the development of this new language, saw the children's gesturing as mime and as a failure to acquire Spanish. Unable to understand what the children were saying to each other, they asked for outside help. In June 1986, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education contacted Judy Kegl, an American Sign Language linguist from MIT. As Kegl and other researchers began to analyze the language, they noticed that the young children had taken the pidgin-like form of the older children to a higher level of complexity, with verb agreement and other conventions of grammar. This more complex sign language is now known as "Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua" (ISN).
American Sign Language
SignWriting, proposed in 1974 by Valerie Sutton, is the first writing system to gain use among the public and the first writing system for sign languages to be included in the Unicode Standard. SignWriting consists of more than 5000 distinct iconic graphs/glyphs. Currently, it is in use in many schools for the Deaf, particularly in Brazil, and has been used in International Sign forums with speakers and researchers in more than 40 countries, including Brazil, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Tunisia, and the United States. Sutton SignWriting has both a printed and an electronically produced form so that persons can use the system anywhere that oral languages are written (personal letters, newspapers, and media, academic research). The systematic examination of the International Sign Writing Alphabet (ISWA) as an equivalent usage structure to the International Phonetic Alphabet for spoken languages has been proposed. According to some researchers, SignWriting is not a phonemic orthography and does not have a one-to-one map from phonological forms to written forms. This assertion has been disputed and the process for each country to look at the ISWA and create a phonemic/morphemic assignment of features of each sign language was proposed by researchers Msc. Roberto Cesar Reis da Costa and Madson Barreto in a thesis forum on June 23, 2014. The SignWriting community has an open project on Wikimedia Labs to support the various Wikimedia projects on Wikimedia Incubator and elsewhere involving SignWriting. The ASL Wikipedia request was marked as eligible in 2008 and the test ASL Wikipedia has 50 articles written in ASL using SignWriting.
French Sign Language
French Sign Language is frequently, though mistakenly, attributed to the work of Charles Michel de l'Épée (l'abbé de l'Épée). In fact, he is said to have discovered the already existing language by total accident; having ducked into a nearby house to escape the rain, he fell upon a pair of deaf twin sisters and was struck by the richness and complexity of the language that they used to communicate among themselves and the deaf Parisian community. The abbé set himself to learning the language, now known as Old French Sign Language, and eventually he established a free school for the deaf. At this school, he developed a system he called "methodical signs", to teach his students how to read and write. The abbé was eventually able to make public demonstrations (1771–1774) of his system, demonstrations that attracted educators and celebrities from all over the continent and that popularised the idea that the deaf could be educated, especially by gesture.
Prelingual deafness
Sign language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), is a well known form of communication that is linguistic for both hearing and deaf individuals. Deaf children learning a sign language such as ASL go through a series of language milestones from birth through one year of age. These milestones are similar to those of spoken language. A deaf child is aware of his/her environment, enjoys human interaction, smiles, and enjoys hand play from birth to 3 months of age. From 3–6 months a deaf child also begins to babble, referred to as finger babbling. These gestures of the deaf children do not have real meaning, any more than babble noises have meaning, but they are more deliberate than the random finger flutters and fist clenches of hearing babies. (Angier, 1991) Between 6–12 months, deaf children use manual communication and communicate with gestures, such as pulling and pointing. Many deaf children sign their first word around 8 months and up to 10 or more signs by 12 months.
Hawai'i Sign Language
HSL was recognized by linguists on March 1, 2013 by a research group from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. The research team found a letter from Reverend Hiram Bingham to Reverend Thomas H. Gallaudet from Feb. 23, 1821. The letter described several instances of Deaf natives communicating to Bingham in their own sign language. At the time of discovery, the language was used by around 40 people, mostly over 80-years-old. 
HSL is not itself a pidgin, but alternate names for the language are documented as Hawai'i Pidgin Sign Language or Pidgin Sign Language. This is due to an inaccurate historical association with the spoken language Hawaiʻi Pidgin. Linguists who have begun to document the language and community members prefer the name "Hawaiʻi Sign Language", and that is the name used for it in ISO 639-3 as of 2014.