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Everything about American Sign Language

Sign language predominantly used in the US

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. 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. Wikipedia →

🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path

  1. Read the overview: American Sign LanguageA 5-minute orientation
  2. Skim a recent paper: Deep Learning Technology to Recognize American Sign Language AlphabetInfluential work since 2022
  3. Pick up a classic book: American sign languageThe most-reprinted book on the subject
  4. Read the landmark paper: American Sign Language: The Phonological BaseCited 381 times
  5. Go sideways: American manual alphabetA closely related topic
  6. Go sideways: William StokoeA closely related topic

📖 Definitions

No dictionary entry for this exact phrase.

🗂️ The subject at a glance

  1. Basic history
  2. Classification
  3. History
  4. Population
  5. Geographic distribution
  6. Regional variation
  7. Varieties
  8. Stigma
  9. Writing systems
  10. Phonology
  11. Grammar
  12. Sign language interpretation

🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)

🆕 Influential since 2022

📚 Books worth reading

Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.

🔗 Related topics