The Evolution of American Sign Language
Digital media is changing language, sometimes quickly. We explore the example of American Sign Language.
During a train ride from New York to Connecticut last fall, my colleague Amanda Morris and her mother were having a conversation in American Sign Language. A man sitting next to them saw them signing and decided to join in their conversation.
Like Amanda, he was a child of deaf adults who grew up using ASL at home and speaking English elsewhere. And he noticed a trait of Amanda: she signed as someone who was much older than her. He started gently teasing her about it, saying she was using signs that had fallen out of fashion.
He had had a similar experience, said he says, when he went through training to become an interpreter. During this training, he learned that some of his signs - those he had learned from his parents - were obsolete.
The experience inspired Amanda, who is hard of hearing, to take an ASL class, and she noticed the same trend. "I saw a lot of differences between the way my young deaf teacher signed and the way my parents signed," she told me. In those differences, Amanda recognized there was a story to be told, and The Times has just published it.
The article documents the changes sweeping the ASL. Many are the result of the spread of smartphones and video, which have led to a blossoming of ASL conversations, many of them remotely. "In the past, the FSA was more head-to-head," Amanda said. "Now a word can spread like wildfire on TikTok, and it could never have happened before."
An old computer sign, for example, involved large circular movements to evoke the magnetic tapes that once stored data; a new sign combines the letter C with a small circular movement reminiscent of the old sign. As is often the case, the new sign is more compact - and therefore fully visible on a phone's tight video plane.
Other changes attempt to make ASL more inclusive and accurate. An old sign for Italy included a cross, but many Italians are now secular; a new sign traces the wavy outline of the shape of Italy, the famous boot. An old sign for bisexual seemed to imply polygamy; a new sign is simply the letters B and I. An old diversity sign included a zigzag that suggested inequality; a new sign evokes colors, differences and a large group of people.
Change is obviously part of every language. Merriam-Webster has added hundreds of new entries to its English dictionary in recent years, including super-spreader, horchata, woke, and papa bod. But ASL has a few qualities that can cause rapid change.
Most ASL users, unlike Amanda, haven't learned the language from their parents. (Over 90% of Deaf people have hearing parents.) Instead, people tend to learn the language through classes and from their peers. Curriculum and slang can both change faster than language habits passed down from generation to generation.
Digital media is changing language, sometimes quickly. We explore the example of American Sign Language.
During a train ride from New York to Connecticut last fall, my colleague Amanda Morris and her mother were having a conversation in American Sign Language. A man sitting next to them saw them signing and decided to join in their conversation.
Like Amanda, he was a child of deaf adults who grew up using ASL at home and speaking English elsewhere. And he noticed a trait of Amanda: she signed as someone who was much older than her. He started gently teasing her about it, saying she was using signs that had fallen out of fashion.
He had had a similar experience, said he says, when he went through training to become an interpreter. During this training, he learned that some of his signs - those he had learned from his parents - were obsolete.
The experience inspired Amanda, who is hard of hearing, to take an ASL class, and she noticed the same trend. "I saw a lot of differences between the way my young deaf teacher signed and the way my parents signed," she told me. In those differences, Amanda recognized there was a story to be told, and The Times has just published it.
The article documents the changes sweeping the ASL. Many are the result of the spread of smartphones and video, which have led to a blossoming of ASL conversations, many of them remotely. "In the past, the FSA was more head-to-head," Amanda said. "Now a word can spread like wildfire on TikTok, and it could never have happened before."
An old computer sign, for example, involved large circular movements to evoke the magnetic tapes that once stored data; a new sign combines the letter C with a small circular movement reminiscent of the old sign. As is often the case, the new sign is more compact - and therefore fully visible on a phone's tight video plane.
Other changes attempt to make ASL more inclusive and accurate. An old sign for Italy included a cross, but many Italians are now secular; a new sign traces the wavy outline of the shape of Italy, the famous boot. An old sign for bisexual seemed to imply polygamy; a new sign is simply the letters B and I. An old diversity sign included a zigzag that suggested inequality; a new sign evokes colors, differences and a large group of people.
Change is obviously part of every language. Merriam-Webster has added hundreds of new entries to its English dictionary in recent years, including super-spreader, horchata, woke, and papa bod. But ASL has a few qualities that can cause rapid change.
Most ASL users, unlike Amanda, haven't learned the language from their parents. (Over 90% of Deaf people have hearing parents.) Instead, people tend to learn the language through classes and from their peers. Curriculum and slang can both change faster than language habits passed down from generation to generation.
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