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What is American Sign Language?

 * American Sign Language is a visual language used by Deaf individuals and their families in the United States of America, Canada, and other English speaking countries. Words are formed by moving recognized hand shapes in specific patterns or to specific locations.  Hand gesturing does occur with every language, but these do not convey concepts.  American Sign Language, or ASL, is used to convey thoughts, feelings, and dreams.

Signed languages are developed with most every spoken language out of necessity to communicate with people who cannot hear or cannot hear well. Deaf people have a profound hearing loss and mostly cannot tell that noise is happening around them. Hard-of-Hearing people have significant hearing loss, but with the use of hearing aids may be able to understand speech.

As signed langauges are developed by families with common needs in a particular area, those families general share the same culture and native spoken language. As recent as 100 years ago, most Deaf people were dependent upon their immediate families to meet all their needs. Thus the Deaf population, and their family's or their country's signed language, did not tend to migrate far. Each country generally has their own signed language with their own syntax and grammar.
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Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet

 * American Sign Language was congealed by American Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet in collaboration with Frenchman Laurent Clerc, a deaf man learned in French Sign Language, starting in 1815. With community impetuous they opened up the American School for the Deaf 1817 to seven deaf students.  This was the beginning of a centralized Deaf Culture in the United States.

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet's son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, became the first principal of the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind in 1856. In 1864, Gallaudet sought college status for the Columbia Institution and got it when President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill into law which authorized the Columbia Institution to award college degrees. In 1986 it became known as Gallaudet College, today an icon of Deaf culture.

William Stokoe

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Sign Language Uses

 * Continue this lesson on Sign Language Uses

Contact your instructor

 * Your instructor for this class is Positivesigner. To email me, you simply @undefined.  [[Image:Crystal Clear app xfmail.png|32px]]