Essay On Sign Language

The world has an abundance of culture and language that forms an important part of human society. Every single one of these qualities of society is one of a kind and uncommon in their own particular manner. One of the most intriguing marvel of society is how we speak and communicate using language, but to those individuals who are not able to hear spoken language have no use of it. These groups of individuals have developed their own language, one that utilizes hand signs and body gestures to communicate. This type of communication is called Sign Language. Nobody truly knows where and when sign languages started however it is known to have developed over time from numerous individuals and is almost as diverse as spoken language. Sign language

It is the first language used by deaf North Americans, and the fourth most commonly used language in the United

In the early nineteenth century, Laurent Clerc, a teacher from this school, was brought to the US by Thomas Gallaudet, an American minister who was trying to establish a school for deaf children (Yule, 2010, p.202). In the nineteenth century, this imported version of sign language, which had features of indigenous natural sign languages used by the American deaf, evolved into what is now known as ASL. Such origins help to clarify why ASL and BSL (in Britain) are so different from each other.

In ASL, signers utilize four key aspects of visual information which are potrayed as the articulatory parameters of ASL in terms of shape of the hand used to make the sign, orientation of the palm while making the sign, location of the sign(on or in front of the body) and movement of the handshape making the sign. There is a fifth parameter which was recently included, it is, the non-manual markers which comprises of the facial expressions and/or body movements that are used to create meaning (Yule, 2010,