American Sign Language Variations

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the sociolinguistic variations of American Sign Language found across the United States. Variations of ASL based on regional, social economic background, and ethnicity will be discussed. Deaf Americans are as ethnically diverse as the general population in the United States. This is a multicultural group that differs in more than just skin color and ethnic heritage. They differ across a variety of dimensions like age, and extent of hearing loss, gender, geographic location, country of birth, communication preference, language use, educational level, occupation, and social economic background. Many laws like the ADA and IDEA have impacted the Deaf community by making assess to education, communication, and work more feasible then in the past. The age of technology, like the Internet and smart phones, has impacted this community in many positive ways. This has all played into the ASL linguistic variations seen presently in the U.S. We must also understand that ASL like any other language is a dynamic system that is constantly in a state of change. With this in understanding, the study of the impact of sign variation on understanding will be discussed in this paper.

Data:
The data collected for this research paper is a signed sample of a popular …show more content…
(Taylor 1986) Deaf individuals tend to sign more English order due to the fact that they have more contact with the English language. In addition, Deaf individuals also tend to fingerspell more and their vocabulary has more academic-related signs. Non-educated Deaf use more ASL structure according to Taylor (1986). Educated Deaf can rapidly switch from ASL to Signed English or contact signing in the presence of a Hearing person compared to non-educated