American Sign Language Kacie Huber

ASL is NOT English You can change the meaning of a word with your posture or facial expression. Thomas Gallaudet brought Laurent Clerc back to America from France and founded the first American school for the deaf ASL is heavily influenced by French sign language and with sign in America British sign language is very different than ASL Sign language is its own language because it has its own grammer, morphology, and syntax and vthe man that proved that is William Stokoe

Deaf Culture: ASL Facts NOT ALL DEAF PEOPLE USE SIGN LANGUAGE!!! 93% of deaf children are born into a hearing family and only 7% are born into a deaf family ASL is the fourth most used language in the U.S. Not all deaf people can read lips and if they are trying to lip read, they are guessing what you are saying over 50% of the time This might lead to miscommunication

My Facts Stokoe wanted to show everyone that sign language was an official language so he made a descriptive system for the language to be demonstrated so that the general public could see understand. There was biography done on William Stokoe it was by Jane Maher, Seeing Language in Sign: The Work of William C. Stokoe, published by Gallaudet University Press in 1996. Trying to read lips is very hard because many words look the same. “For example, "p(ail), b(ail), and m(ail)" look the same.”

Websites http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/stokoe.html http://deafness.about.com/cs/communication/a/lipreading.htm