For this part of my learning project, I wanted to look into the history of ASL. As a new language, I felt I wanted to know the past about something I am learning and be able to compare it to the progression it has made to this time in an age.
A few questions that came to mind when learning ASL were:
- Who came up with all these signs for everything in the world?
- When did it become a known language that many people of hearing and non-hearing knew by heart?
When looking into a textbook/workbook my sister left at home from an ASL class she took during university called “Signing Naturally Student Workbook”, I was able to find out some interesting things; more specifically what would answer a few of my questions above.
The first few pages of the handbook, it goes through the history of ASL. Some information I took away was:
- That ASL was able to be tracked back to the 1600s from Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod. The village contained numerous Deaf people, resulting in the development of sign language between them. There were also found to be indigenous signs within the mainlands, and together these students brought their sign language to the first school for the Deaf in Connecticut in 1817.
- This information seems almost surreal because in my mind it seems hard to imagine the different amounts of sign language being brought together to create one.
- One of the founders of the school, Laurent Clerc was a french teacher who brought in French sign language, where they then blended both the indigenous and French sign languages to form ASL.
Finding out this information is an interesting insight into how much ASL is spread around the world now, and has become the language it is from those beginning stages.
The textbook Signing Naturally Student Workbook is a great tool for helping to learn ASL. If you’ve become interested in learning ASL yourself, you can download it as a PDF using the above link.
“Signing Naturally Student Workbook Units 1-6” by Cheri Smith, Ella Mae Lentz, Ken Mikos (Dawsign Press. 2008).
