Editing American Sign Language (section)

== History ==
[[File:Sign language interpreter.jpg|thumb|upright|alt=signing man sitting in the foreground, with a speaker standing at a podium in the background|A sign language interpreter at a presentation]]
Prior to the birth of ASL, sign language had been used by various communities in the United States.<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|5}} In the United States, as elsewhere in the world, hearing families with deaf children have historically employed ad hoc [[home sign]], which often reaches much higher levels of sophistication than gestures used by hearing people in spoken conversation.<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|5}} As early as 1541 at first contact by [[Francisco Vásquez de Coronado]], there were reports that the [[Plains Indians|Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains]] widely spoke [[Plains Indian Sign Language|a sign language]] to communicate across vast national and linguistic lines.<ref>Ceil Lucas, 1995, ''The Sociolinguistics of the Deaf Community''</ref>{{rp|80}}

In the 19th century, a "triangle" of [[village sign language]]s developed in [[New England]]: one in [[Martha's Vineyard]], Massachusetts; one in [[Henniker, New Hampshire]], and one in [[Sandy River Valley, Maine]].<ref name=Lane_Pillard_French>{{Harvcoltxt|Lane|Pillard|French|2000|p=17}}</ref> [[Martha's Vineyard Sign Language]] (MVSL), which was particularly important for the history of ASL, was used mainly in [[Chilmark, Massachusetts]].<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|5–6}} Due to intermarriage in the original community of English settlers of the 1690s, and the [[recessive]] nature of genetic deafness, Chilmark had a high 4% rate of genetic deafness.<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|5–6}} MVSL was used even by hearing residents whenever a deaf person was present,<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|5–6}} and also in some situations where spoken language would be ineffective or inappropriate, such as during church sermons or between boats at sea.<ref name="Groce1985">{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/everyoneherespok00groc_0|url-access=registration|quote=everyone here sign.|title=Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard|last=Groce|first=Nora Ellen|publisher=Harvard University Press|year=1985|isbn=978-0-674-27041-1|location=Cambridge, MA|access-date=21 October 2010}}</ref>

ASL is thought to have originated in the [[American School for the Deaf]] (ASD), founded in [[Hartford, Connecticut]], in 1817.<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|4}} Originally known as ''The American Asylum, At Hartford, For The Education And Instruction Of The Deaf And Dumb'', the school was founded by the Yale graduate and divinity student [[Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet]].<ref name="asd">{{cite web|url=http://www.asd-1817.org/page.cfm?p=429|title=A Brief History of ASD|access-date=November 25, 2012|publisher=American School for the Deaf|date=n.d.|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140301084033/http://www.asd-1817.org/page.cfm?p=429|archive-date=March 1, 2014|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref name="dhm">{{cite web|url=http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=1371|title=A Brief History Of The American Asylum, At Hartford, For The Education And Instruction Of The Deaf And Dumb|year=1893|access-date=November 25, 2012|archive-date=September 5, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130905215220/http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=1371|url-status=live}}</ref> Gallaudet, inspired by his success in demonstrating the learning abilities of a young deaf girl [[Alice Cogswell]], traveled to Europe in order to learn deaf pedagogy from European institutions.<ref name="asd" /> Ultimately, Gallaudet chose to adopt the methods of the French [[Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris]], and convinced [[Laurent Clerc]], an assistant to the school's founder [[Charles-Michel de l'Épée]], to accompany him back to the United States.<ref name="asd" />{{efn|The [[Abbé]] [[Charles-Michel de l'Épée]], founder of the Parisian school [[Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris]], was the first to acknowledge that sign language could be used to educate the deaf. An oft-repeated folk tale states that while visiting a parishioner, Épee met two deaf daughters conversing with each other using LSF. The mother explained that her daughters were being educated privately by means of pictures. Épée is said to have been inspired by those deaf children when he established the first educational institution for the deaf.<ref>See:
* {{cite journal |doi=10.1080/00016480510026287 |title=Sign language: Its history and contribution to the understanding of the biological nature of language |year=2005 |last1=Ruben |first1=Robert J. |journal=Acta Oto-Laryngologica |volume=125 |issue=5 |pages=464–7 |pmid=16092534|s2cid=1704351 }}
* {{cite book
| last = Padden
| first = Carol A.
| author-link = Carol Padden
| title = Folk Explanation in Language Survival in: Deaf World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook, Lois Bragg, Ed.
| publisher = New York University Press
| year = 2001
| location = New York
| pages = 107–108
| isbn = 978-0-8147-9853-9 }}
</ref>}} Upon his return, Gallaudet founded the ASD on April 15, 1817.<ref name="asd" />

The largest group of students during the first seven decades of the school were from Martha's Vineyard, and they brought MVSL with them.<ref name="padden"/>{{rp|10}} There were also 44 students from around Henniker, New Hampshire, and 27 from the Sandy River valley in Maine, each of which had their own village sign language.<ref name="padden"/>{{rp|11}}{{efn|Whereas deafness was genetically recessive on Martha's Vineyard, it was dominant in Henniker. On the one hand, this dominance likely aided the development of sign language in Henniker since families would be more likely to have the critical mass of deaf people necessary for the propagation of signing. On the other hand, in Martha's Vineyard the deaf were more likely to have more hearing relatives, which may have fostered a sense of shared identity that led to more inter-group communication than in Henniker.<ref>See {{Harvcoltxt|Lane|Pillard|French|2000|p=39}}.</ref>}} Other students brought knowledge of their own home signs.<ref name="padden" />{{rp|11}} Laurent Clerc, the first teacher at ASD, taught using [[French Sign Language]] (LSF), which itself had developed in the Parisian school for the deaf established in 1755.<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|7}} From that situation of [[language contact]], a new language emerged, now known as ASL.<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|7}}

[[File:ASL convention.jpg|thumb|alt=man standing on a stage in the foreground addressing a seated crowd|American Sign Language Convention of March 2008 in Austin, Texas]] 
More schools for the deaf were founded after ASD, and knowledge of ASL spread to those schools.<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|7}} In addition, the rise of Deaf community organizations bolstered the continued use of ASL.<ref name="bahan"/>{{rp|8}} Societies such as the [[National Association of the Deaf (United States)|National Association of the Deaf]] and the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf held national conventions that attracted signers from across the country.<ref name="padden"/>{{rp|13}} All of that contributed to ASL's wide use over a large geographical area, atypical of a sign language.<ref name="padden" />{{rp|14}}<ref name="padden" />{{rp|12}}

While [[oralism]], an approach to educating deaf students focusing on oral language, had previously been used in American schools, the [[Milan Congress]] made it dominant and effectively banned the use of sign languages at schools in the United States and Europe. However, the efforts of Deaf advocates and educators, more lenient enforcement of the Congress's mandate, and the use of ASL in religious education and proselytism ensured greater use and documentation compared to European sign languages, albeit more influenced by fingerspelled loanwords and borrowed idioms from English as students were societally pressured to achieve fluency in spoken language.{{sfn|Shaw|Delaporte|2015|p=xii-xiv}} Nevertheless, oralism remained the predominant method of deaf education up to the 1950s.<ref name="stokoe">{{Harvcoltxt|Armstrong|Karchmer|2002}}</ref> Linguists did not consider sign language to be true "language" but as something inferior.<ref name="stokoe" /> Recognition of the legitimacy of ASL was achieved by [[William Stokoe]], a linguist who arrived at [[Gallaudet University]] in 1955 when that was still the dominant assumption.<ref name="stokoe" /> Aided by the [[Civil Rights Movement]] of the [[1960s in the United States|1960s]], Stokoe argued for [[manualism]], the use of sign language in deaf education.<ref name="stokoe" /><ref>Stokoe, William C. 1960. [http://saveourdeafschools.org/stokoe_1960.pdf Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131202224634/http://saveourdeafschools.org/stokoe_1960.pdf |date=2013-12-02 }}, ''Studies in linguistics: Occasional papers (No. 8)''. Buffalo: Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo.</ref> Stokoe noted that sign language shares the important features that oral languages have as a means of communication, and even devised a [[Transcription (linguistics)|transcription]] system for ASL.<ref name="stokoe" /> In doing so, Stokoe revolutionized both deaf education and linguistics.<ref name="stokoe" /> In the 1960s, ASL was sometimes referred to as "Ameslan", but that term is now considered obsolete.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.handspeak.com/byte/a/index.php?byte=ameslan |title=American Sign Language, ASL or Ameslan |publisher=Handspeak.com |access-date=2012-05-21 |archive-date=2013-06-05 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130605213919/http://www.handspeak.com/byte/a/index.php?byte=ameslan |url-status=dead }}</ref>