Smartphones prompt sign language to evolve
For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound effect on American Sign Language, which relies on hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning.
Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens.
Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required.
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.
“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.
The pace of innovation, while thrilling for some, has also begun to drive a wedge between generations of Deaf culture. (Just as there can be different signs for the same thing, Deaf is capitalized by some people in references to a distinct cultural identity.)
Perhaps the most dramatic example: To accommodate the tight space of video screens, signs are shrinking.
“My two daughters sign in such a small space, and I’m like, can you please stretch it out a little?” said E. Lynn Jacobowitz, 69, a former president of the American Sign Language Teachers Association. “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?’ ”
The problem is familiar to Shaw, 44, and her wife, who is deaf. 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.
Signs that were more complex or crossed more zones of the body have tended to fall out of favor, experts said. But small screens appear to be accelerating that trend by encouraging tighter gestures and giving the new versions a way to spread quickly — just like a new dance move on TikTok.
“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. “That’s a challenge for the community because it’s a different kind of language transmission.”
Unlike spoken languages, American Sign Language is not typically passed down through generations of a family. More than 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, so they have tended to learn from institutions or their peers rather than parents.
That creates a higher degree of variation between generations of deaf people than is typical with spoken languages, said Julie A. Hochgesang, a deaf linguist at Gallaudet University who maintains an ASL sign bank that documents variations in ASL.
For a portion of the 20th century, many schools for the deaf were more inclined to try to teach their students spoken English, rather than ASL, based on harmful beliefs that signing was inferior to spoken language.
Today, with ASL on the upswing, young people might be learning it from Chrissy Marshall, 22, a deaf TikTok influencer living in the Los Angeles area. ASL has its own rules of grammar, but in her videos, she sometimes adapts her signs to more closely follow the English rules that her viewers might know better.
Those kinds of changes don’t sit well with everyone. MJ Bienvenu, 69, of Austin, Texas, quit an 87,000-member ASL Facebook group because she said too many people were using newly invented signs that didn’t fit the language’s existing guidelines.
“Many people were inventing signs that didn’t make sense,” said Bienvenu, who is a retired Deaf studies professor. “I feel like many people don’t realize that they bastardize ASL, and it harms more than it helps.”