Why American Sign Language Is Not English

American Sign Language is routinely described as a signed version of English. It is a separate language with a grammar English does not share.

Grammar happens in space

Signers establish locations in the space in front of them and assign people or things to those points, then refer back to them by direction throughout the conversation.

Verbs move between those locations to show who acted on whom, so a relationship English encodes with word order and pronouns is encoded here with direction.

Nothing in spoken English works this way, which is why a word-for-word rendering of an English sentence into signs produces something no fluent signer would say.

The face carries grammatical information

Raised eyebrows, a head tilt or a slight lean are not expressions of feeling in ASL. They mark question types, conditionals and topics.

A sentence signed with identical hand movements can be a statement or a question depending on the face, in the way English uses intonation and auxiliary verbs.

This is why filming only the hands loses grammar, and why interpreters cannot work with their faces obscured.

It did not descend from English

ASL developed from contact between existing signing among deaf Americans and a French signing tradition brought to early deaf education in the United States.

The result shares historical vocabulary with French sign language and almost none with British sign language, despite the shared spoken language.

Deaf Americans and deaf Britons therefore cannot readily understand one another, while ASL and French signing show a family resemblance.

Fingerspelling is a bridge, not the language

Letters exist and are used for names, technical terms and words with no established sign, and fluent signers spell rapidly.

Spelling out ordinary vocabulary would be like speaking English by pronouncing each letter, and it is not what signing consists of.

Manual systems that encode English word order sign by sign do exist and were developed for classrooms, but they are coding systems rather than natural languages.

Interpreting is translation between languages

An interpreter is converting meaning between two grammars in real time, not transcribing, which is why the output is not in step word for word with the speaker.

The lag is the interpreter waiting for enough of a sentence to know its structure, since ASL may need information English places at the end.

Certification, qualification and legal requirements for interpreters vary by state and setting and change over time, so the arrangements differ considerably from one place to another.