American Sign Language (ASL), is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. 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.
Sign languages are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages.
William Clarence Stokoe Jr. was an American linguist and a long-time professor at Gallaudet University. His research on American Sign Language (ASL) revolutionized the understanding of ASL in the United States and sign languages throughout the world. Stokoe's work led to a widespread recognition that sign languages are true languages, exhibiting syntax and morphology, and are not only systems of gesture.
Washoe was a female common chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to communicate using American Sign Language (ASL) as part of an animal research experiment on animal language acquisition.
The American Manual Alphabet (AMA) is a manual alphabet that augments the vocabulary of American Sign Language.
A contact sign language, or contact sign, is a variety or style of language that arises from contact between deaf individuals using a sign language and hearing individuals using an oral language. Contact languages also arise between different sign languages, although the term pidgin rather than contact sign is used to describe such phenomena.
Stokoe notation is the first phonemic script used for sign languages. It was created by William Stokoe for American Sign Language (ASL), with Latin letters and numerals used for the shapes they have in fingerspelling, and iconic glyphs to transcribe the position, movement, and orientation of the hands. It was first published as the organizing principle of Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf (1960), and later also used in A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, by Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg (1965). In the 1965 dictionary, signs are themselves arranged alphabetically, according to their Stokoe transcription, rather than being ordered by their English glosses as in other sign-language dictionaries. This made it the only ASL dictionary where the reader could look up a sign without first knowing how to translate it into English. The Stokoe notation was later adapted to British Sign Language (BSL) in Kyle et al. (1985) and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages in Kendon (1988). In each case the researchers modified the alphabet to accommodate phonemes not found in ASL.
American Psychologist is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. The journal publishes articles of broad interest to psychologists, including empirical reports and scholarly reviews covering science, practice, education, and policy, and occasionally publishes special issues on relevant topics in the field of psychology. The editor-in-chief is Harris Cooper.
Kata Kolok, also known as Benkala Sign Language and Balinese Sign Language, is a village sign language which is indigenous to two neighbouring villages in northern Bali, Indonesia. The main village, Bengkala, has had high incidences of deafness for over seven generations. Notwithstanding the biological time depth of the recessive mutation that causes deafness, the first substantial cohort of deaf signers did not occur until five generations ago, and this event marks the emergence of Kata Kolok. The sign language has been acquired by at least five generations of deaf, native signers and features in all aspects of village life, including political, professional, educational, and religious settings.
Gallaudet University Press (GUPress) is a publisher that focuses on issues relating to deafness and sign language. It is a part of Gallaudet University in Washington D.C., and was founded in 1980 by the university's Board of Trustees. The press is a member of the Association of University Presses. The press publishes two quarterly journals: American Annals of the Deaf and Sign Language Studies.
Addiction is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1903 by the Society for the Study of Addiction to Alcohol and other Drugs as the British Journal of Inebriety. It was renamed British Journal of Addiction to Alcohol & Other Drugs in 1947, then renamed to British Journal of Addiction in 1980, before finally obtaining its current name in 1993. It covers research relating to the abuse of alcohol, illicit drugs, and tobacco, as well as behavioural addictions. The editor-in-chief is John Marsden.
Language Testing is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering language testing and assessment. Its editors-in-chief are Luke Harding and Paula Winke. It was established in 1984 and is published by SAGE Publications.
The sociolinguistics of sign languages is the application of sociolinguistic principles to the study of sign languages. The study of sociolinguistics in the American Deaf community did not start until the 1960s. Until recently, the study of sign language and sociolinguistics has existed in two separate domains. Nonetheless, now it is clear that many sociolinguistic aspects do not depend on modality and that the combined examination of sociolinguistics and sign language offers countless opportunities to test and understand sociolinguistic theories. The sociolinguistics of sign languages focuses on the study of the relationship between social variables and linguistic variables and their effect on sign languages. The social variables external from language include age, region, social class, ethnicity, and sex. External factors are social by nature and may correlate with the behavior of the linguistic variable. The choices made of internal linguistic variant forms are systematically constrained by a range of factors at both the linguistic and the social levels. The internal variables are linguistic in nature: a sound, a handshape, and a syntactic structure. What makes the sociolinguistics of sign language different from the sociolinguistics of spoken languages is that sign languages have several variables both internal and external to the language that are unique to the Deaf community. Such variables include the audiological status of a signer's parents, age of acquisition, and educational background. There exist perceptions of socioeconomic status and variation of "grassroots" deaf people and middle-class deaf professionals, but this has not been studied in a systematic way. "The sociolinguistic reality of these perceptions has yet to be explored". Many variations in dialects correspond or reflect the values of particular identities of a community.
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: black deaf signers at black schools and white deaf signers at white schools. As of the mid 2010s, BASL is still used by signers in the South despite public schools having been legally desegregated since 1954.
Terrorism and Political Violence is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering terrorism and counter-terrorism published by Routledge. It was established in 1989 by David C. Rapoport, who remains editor-in-chief. In the editorial manifesto in its first issue, it is referred to as the Journal of Terrorism Research; however, from its first issue until the present, in editorial statements and elsewhere, it is only ever cited as Terrorism and Political Violence.
Navajo Family Sign is a sign language used by a small deaf community of the Navajo People.
Ceil Lucas is an American linguist. Lucas is a professor emerita of Gallaudet University. Lucas was a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Gallaudet University until her retirement in 2014. Lucas is currently the editor of Sign Language Studies at Gallaudet University Press, a position she's held since 2009.
Carl Gustav Arvid Olof Croneberg was a Swedish-American Deaf linguist known for his work on American Sign Language (ASL).
The Journal of LGBT Youth is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering gender studies especially as pertaining to LGBT youth. It was established in 2003 as Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education, obtaining its current title in 2008, and is published by Routledge. The editors-in-chief are James T. Sears and Kristopher Wells.
Dorothy Chiyoko Sueoka Casterline is a deaf linguist known for her contribution to A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, considered a foundational work of sign language linguistics.
