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Sign Language Lesson 1 – The History of American Sign Language

A long long time ago, in the 1600’s, Geronimo Cardano, a Northern Italian Physician declared that deaf people could be taught to understand written combinations of pictures by associating those pictures with the thing they represented. This led to the first book ever published that contained and explained the Manual Alphabet ( Fancy Word For Fingerspelling or ASL Alphabet ). This book was published in 1620 by a Juan Pablo de Bonet.

Over 100 years later …

around 1755 a man from Paris named, Abbe Charles Michel de L’Epee founded the first no cost school for deaf people. L’Epee taught that deaf people could develop communications with themselves and the hearing world through a conventional system of gestures, fingerspelling, and hand signs. Abbe created and demonstrated a Signed Language where each sign would be a picture/symbol suggesting the concept or communication desired.

Mr. L’Epee was definitely a highly creative person. The way he developed his Sign Language system was by first recognizing and then learning signs that were being used by a group of deaf people in Paris, France. Adding to this, L’Epee created a form of Sign Language that resembled a signed version of the spoken French language. This was the first, most important step in standardizing language for deaf people. Now there was a bridge to fill the gap between the deaf and hearing worlds.

Another prominent educator of the deaf rose in the same period. Around 1778. Samuel Heinicke of Leipzig, Germany did not use the manual and gestural form of the language, rather choosing to promote speechreading and speech. Heinicke was the first educator to establish a governmental sponsored public school for the deaf.

The manual and oral methods of Sign Language were the forerunners and bricklayers of todays concept of Total Communication. Total Communication promotes the use of all methods of communication available. Methods such as; sign language, gesturing, fingerspelling, speech, hearing aids, speechreading, reading, writing and pictures/symbols.

The Great Plains Indians in America developed a very extensive system of Sign Language but this form of Sign Language was intended more for inter-tribal use, rather than improving communication for deaf people. Only small pieces of this system remain today. It is rather interesting however, to note that there are many similarities between the old Indian Sign Language system and the modern day American Sign Language system.

Then rose Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a highly energetic, congressional minister who became interested in the deaf world through his neighbors young daughter, Alice Cogswell. Alice was deaf. In 1815, Gallaudet travelled to Europe to study methods of communication with deaf people there. He was 27 years old at the time. While he was there, he was invited to study in Paris at a school for deaf people. Several months later, he returned to the Americas with a man named Laurent Clerc, a deaf sign language instructor from the school in Paris.

The first school for the deaf in the United States was founded by Gallaudet in Hartford, Connecticut in 1817. Clerc then became the first deaf Sign Language teacher in the United States. Shortly thereafter, schools for the deaf began to appear in several States around the country. Among them was the New York School For The Deaf, which opened in 1818. Another school was opened in Pennsylvania in 1820, and by the time it was 1863, there were a total of twenty-two schools that had been established for deaf people in the United States.

In 1864 an important milestone was set. There had been established the first and only ever liberal arts college for the deaf named Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C. This was a very important step in the history of deaf education.

Today, American Sign Language has been recognized as an official language, qualified for Foreign Language credit at any University. American Sign Language is now the 4th most spoken language in the United States. Deaf education has made leaps and bounds. There are many resources for deaf and hearing alike to learn and educate themselves of American Sign Language, Deaf Culture, Hearing Culture, and more.

All the while, interest in the American Signed Language continues to grow at an exponential rate. Scientists are coming to conclusions about the effects on the brain of American Sign Language at different points in an individuals life.

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