American Sign Language Online - The historical facts

American Sign Language has a long history before becoming the dominant sign language used in the United States today

. It has no clear origins, though. However, the similarity between the French Sign Language and the ASL suggests that the two forms of sign languages possibly had influenced one another.

There are a number of prominent people in the history of ASL. It is said that around 1815, a Dr. Mason Cogswell who has a deaf nine-year-old daughter named Alice, asked the help of a Protestant minister named Thomas H. Gallaudet to find ways to educate his daughter.

A school in France was known to apply the oral method a method which uses spoken language and is comprised of reading lips, proper breathing and observation of mouth movements but Gallaudet was not fortunate enough for the founders of the school was far from willing to share their techniques with him. However, while he was in London, Gallaudet met Abbe Sicard, then the director of the Paris-based Royal Institution for the Deaf, who invited him to his institution. One of Sicard's students, Laurent Clerc, eventually went back with Gallaudet to Connecticut and became a teacher for the deaf using the Old French Sign Language. Gallaudet and Clerc established the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons. At present, this school is known as the American School for the Deaf.

Although the impact of the French Sign Language is undeniable in the evolution of the American Sign Language, it is still argued that the Americans have their own native sign language even before the arrival of Laurent Clerk in the land of Connecticut. During the 1700s, a small island town in Massachusetts named Martha's Vineyard has a population with a large percentage comprised of deaf people. This paved the way for the development of the island's own natural sign language which made interaction easier for the deaf and hearing citizens of the island.

American Sign Language Online - The historical facts

By: clarie

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