Editing American Sign Language (section)

==== Fingerspelling ====
{{main|Fingerspelling}}
[[File:Asl alphabet gallaudet.svg|thumb|upright=1.1|right|alt=chart of letters in the American manual alphabet, with Latin script equivalents|The American manual alphabet and numbers]]
American Sign Language possesses a set of 26 signs known as the [[American manual alphabet]], which can be used to spell out words from the English language.<ref name="cxxiv">{{Harvcoltxt|Costello|2008|p=xxiv}}</ref> It is rather a representation of the English alphabet, and not a unique alphabet of ASL, although commonly labeled as the "ASL alphabet".<ref>{{Cite web |title=Sign language alphabets |url=https://www.handspeak.com/learn/212/ |access-date=2024-02-21 |website=www.handspeak.com}}</ref> It is borrowed from French Sign Language (LSF), as much of ASL is derived from LSF.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2021-10-29 |title=What Is American Sign Language (ASL)? {{!}} NIDCD |url=https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/american-sign-language |access-date=2024-02-21 |website=www.nidcd.nih.gov |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |date=2021-09-23 |title=The Many Languages of Sign Language |url=https://www.littlepassports.com/blog/world-community/the-many-languages-of-sign-language/ |access-date=2024-02-21 |website=Little Passports |language=en-US}}</ref> Such signs make use of the 19 handshapes of ASL. For example, the signs for 'p' and 'k' use the same handshape but different orientations. A common misconception is that ASL consists only of fingerspelling; although such a method ([[Rochester Method]]) has been used, it is not ASL.<ref name="cxxv">{{Harvcoltxt|Costello|2008|p=xxv}}</ref>

Fingerspelling is a form of [[borrowing (linguistics)|borrowing]], a linguistic process wherein words from one language are incorporated into another.<ref name="cxxv" /> In ASL, fingerspelling is used for [[proper nouns]] and for technical terms with no native ASL equivalent.<ref name="cxxv" /> There are also some other loan words which are fingerspelled, either very short English words or abbreviations of longer English words, e.g. ''O-N'' from English 'on', and ''A-P-T'' from English 'apartment'.<ref name="cxxv" /> Fingerspelling may also be used to emphasize a word that would normally be signed otherwise.<ref name="cxxv" />