“That’s a challenge for the community, because it’s a different kind of language transmission.” “If a person sees someone they like on social media using a new sign, they might think it’s better and adopt it,” said Ted Supalla, a Deaf linguist who has researched the evolution of sign languages. But small screens appear to be accelerating that trend, both by encouraging tighter gestures and giving the new versions a way to spread quickly - just like a new dance move on TikTok. The number of people who use it is difficult to quantify (ASL isn’t an option on Census forms), but in 2006, researchers estimated that it was probably around 500,000.įrom the beginning, signs that were more complex or crossed more zones of the body have tended to fall out of favor, experts said. “When they’re talking with each other, and with their peers,” she said, “I have a very hard time following the conversation.”Įven the oldest signs in ASL are still relatively young, by language standards.Īmerican Sign Language was heavily influenced by French Sign Language, but it wasn’t standardized or formalized until the American School for the Deaf was founded in 1817. (Just as there can be different signs for the same thing, Deaf is capitalized by some people in references to a distinct cultural identity.) They have four children, ranging in age from 7 to 19, who often use the language differently - signing with one hand, for instance, for words that she and her wife might typically make with both. “We chat on FaceTime sometimes, and their hands are so crunched up to fit on the tiny phone screen, and I’m like, ‘What are you saying?’”

Lynn Jacobowitz, 69, a former president of the American Sign Language Teachers Association. “My two daughters sign in such a small space, and I’m like, can you please stretch it out a little?” said E.

Perhaps the most dramatic example: To accommodate the tight space of video screens, signs are shrinking. The pace of innovation, while thrilling for some, has also begun to drive a wedge between generations of Deaf culture. “These innovations are popping up far more frequently than they were before,” said Emily Shaw, who studies the evolution of ASL at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the leading college for the deaf in America. Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language - there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok - and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required. Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning.

For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate.

Sign language for all done