ASL grammar is completely unrelated to that of English.

There is the standard way to sign the word learn that seems to be used by most speakers of ASL in Canada, and there is also an Atlantic regional variation.

A sign that may be lowered to the cheek level by an ASL speaker is more likely to be produced by a Black Sign Language speaker on the forehead, for example: teacher.

ASL is perhaps the most widespread of the world's sign languages, though BANZSL is also spoken around the world.

Bolivian Sign Language, for example, is essentially ASL, apart from changes in initialized signs to make them match the spelling of Spanish.

A similar French influence is seen in classroom ASL in francophone West Africa, where ASL was introduced along with formal education for the deaf by the deaf American missionary Andrew Foster.

Cyprus Sign Language is reported to be a blend of ASL and Greek Sign Language, which may itself have developed from a combination of ASL and FSL.

In the Philippines, ASL is widely understood by the Deaf community, though it is not the ancestor of Philippine Sign Language as sometimes thought.

Countries where ASL or a derivative of ASL is the national or a widespread language include Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana ( with BSL ), Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d ' Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Kenya ( minority use ), Liberia, Madagascar ( minority use ), Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Philippines ( L2 use ), Puerto Rico, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Trinidad and Tobago, Togo, and Zimbabwe ( with ZSL ).

However, there is no one-to-one correspondence between words in ASL and English, and the inflectional modulation of ASL signs — a dominant part of the grammar — is lost.

Stokoe used it for his 1965 A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, the first dictionary with entries in ASL — that is, the first dictionary which one could use to look up a sign without first knowing its conventional gloss in English.

" However, parents can learn to recognize their baby's approximations of adult ASL signs, just as they will later learn to recognize their approximations of oral language, so teaching an infant ASL is also possible.

ASL has come a long way from its condemned days of banned use to being viewed as a grammatical language, which is the main form of communication in American Deaf culture.

* American Sign Language is a Foreign Language – a research / argumentative paper for the consideration of ASL to fulfill University foreign language requirements.

This is a common bird of mountain woodlands at altitudes of up to 3, 500m ASL.

This species is generally found below 4, 500 ft ( c. 2, 000 meters ) ASL and most common below 2, 500 ft ( c. 1, 400 meters ).

There, the subspecies of northeastern Amazonia ( S. g. axillaris ) ranges at least to the Pakaraima Mountains, where it is fairly common at 1, 200-1, 400 meters ASL, descending to about 850 meters ASL on occasion.

In Guyana for example, it is at least locally common above 1, 000 meters ASL in the Pakaraima Mountains ( though not Mount Roraima ), and also inhabits the southern Acari Mountains.

For example, the Plain Antvireo was found to be common, a few dozen meters ASL, in the Dipteryx oleifera, Richard ; O ' Neill, John Patton & Eckelberry, Don R. ( 1991 ): A guide to the birds of Trinidad and Tobago ( 2nd edition ).

ASL grammar was obscured for much of its history by the practice of glossing it rather than transcribing it ( see Writing systems below ), a practice which conveyed little of its grammar apart from word order.

For example, there are more than six signs for birthday in ASL, just as in English one can say couch and sofa, or soda and pop, to mean the same thing.

See American Sign Language family for an incomplete list of ASL varieties used outside North America.

In the 1960s linguist William Stokoe created the first writing system for a sign language, the so-called Stokoe notation, which he designed specifically for ASL.

Several additional candidates for written ASL have appeared in over the years, including Sutton SignWriting, Sign Script, ASL-phabet, and Si5s.

Typically, young children will make an ASL sign in the correct location and use the correct hand motion, but may be able only to approximate the hand shape, for example, using one finger instead of three in signing water.

Many parents today purchase “ Baby Signs ” DVDs and books which incorporate ASL signs for infant and toddler communication.

Free online lessons, ASL dictionary, and resources for teachers, students, and parents.

Other aspects in ASL include the following: stative, inchoative (" to begin to ..."), predisposional (" to tend to ..."), susceptative (" to ... easily "), frequentative (" to ... often "), protractive (" to ... continuously "), incessant (" to ... incessantly "), durative (" to ... for a long time "), iterative (" to ... over and over again "), intensive (" to ... very much "), resultative (" to ... completely "), approximative (" to ... somewhat "), semblitive (" to appear to ..."), increasing (" to ... more and more ").

Aspect is unusual in ASL in that transitive verbs derived for aspect lose their grammatical transitivity.

See Syntax in ASL for details.

There are over a hundred glyphs for hand shapes, but all the ones used in ASL are based on five basic elements:

* ASL-phabet, a minimal script for ASL

ASL also sets the record for sheer volume of playing components, with thousands of official counters and 60 + " geomorphic mapboards " not counting Deluxe and Historical maps.

Tertiary education in the US for some deaf Australian adults also accounts for some ASL borrowings found in modern Auslan.

The ASL marker for " intensity " is iconic in that the intended meaning ( building of pressure, a sudden release ) is matched by the articulatory form ( a pause, a quick completion ).

Moroccan Sign Language was developed by the American Peace Corps on a base of ASL along with incorporating local signs.

The phrase " American Sign Language " in ASL, transcribed in Stokoe notation

The phrase " American Sign Language " in ASL, transcribed in Sutton SignWriting

* American Sign Language ( ASL ) resource site.

In American Sign Language ( ASL ), more lexical items are fingerspelled in casual conversation than in formal or narrative signing.

American Sign Language ( ASL ) is similar to many other sign languages in that it has no grammatical tense but many verbal aspects produced by modifying the base verb sign.

Although the United Kingdom and the United States share English as the predominant oral language, British Sign Language is quite distinct from American Sign Language ( ASL ).

American Sign Language ( ASL )-manual language with its own syntax and grammar, used primarily by people who are deaf.

In American Sign language ( ASL ) a grammatical marker denoting “ intensity ” is characterized by a movement pattern with two parts: an initial pause, followed by a quick completion.

: Since 98. 7 % of the DNA in humans and chimps is identical, some scientists ( but not Noam Chomsky ) believed that a chimp raised in a human family, and using ASL ( American Sign Language ), would shed light on the way language is acquired and used by humans.

In 2010, ASL Inside released an American Sign Language ( ASL ) version of Goodnight Moon through Scholastic.

In American Sign Language ( ASL ), for instance, raised eyebrows combined with a slightly forward head tilt indicate that what is being signed is a yes / no question.

Auslan has also been influenced by Irish Sign Language ( ISL ) and more recently has borrowed signs from American Sign Language ( ASL ).

In more recent times Auslan has seen a significant amount of lexical borrowing from American Sign Language ( ASL ), especially in signs for technical terms.

Australasian Signed English was created in the late 1970s to represent English words and grammar, using mostly Auslan signs together with some additional contrived signs, as well as borrowings from American Sign Language ( ASL ).

French Sign Language is related and partially ancestral to Dutch Sign Language ( NGT ), German Sign Language ( DGS ), Flemish Sign Language ( VGT ), Belgian-French Sign Language ( LSFB ), Irish Sign Language ( ISL ), American Sign Language ( ASL ), Quebec Sign Language ( LSQ ), and Russian Sign Language ( RSL ).

This school became known as the birthplace of the Deaf community in the U. S., and the different sign systems used there, including MVSL, merged to become American Sign Language or ASL — now one of the largest community languages in the country.