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American Sign Language (ASL) is the predominant sign language of deaf communities in the United States and most of anglophone Canada. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (FSL). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology. ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has propagated widely via schools for the deaf and deaf community organizations. Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken, though reliable estimates for American ASL users range from 250,000 to 500,000 persons, including a number of children of deaf adults. ASL users face stigma due to beliefs in the superiority of oral language to sign language, compounded by the fact that ASL is often glossed in English due to the lack of a standard writing system. ASL signs have a number of phonemic components, including movement of the face and torso as well as the hands. ASL is not a form of pantomime, but iconicity does play a larger role in ASL than in spoken languages. English loan words are often borrowed through fingerspelling, although ASL grammar is unrelated to that of English. ASL has verbal agreement and aspectual marking, and has a productive system of forming agglutinative classifiers. Many linguists believe ASL to be a subject-verb-object (SVO) language, but there are several alternative proposals to account for ASL word order. ==Classification== ASL emerged as a language in the American School for the Deaf (ASD), founded in 1817.〔 This school brought together Old French Sign Language (OFSL), various village sign languages, and home sign systems; ASL was created in this situation of language contact.〔〔In particular, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, Henniker Sign Language, and Sandy River Valley Sign Language were brought to the school by students. These in turn appear to have been influenced by early British Sign Language, and did not involve input from indigenous Native American sign systems. See , , and .〕 ASL was influenced by its forerunners but distinct from all of them.〔 The influence of FSL on ASL is readily apparent; for example, it has been found that about 58% of signs in modern ASL are cognate to Old French Sign Language signs.〔 However, this is far less than the standard 80% measure used to determine whether related languages are actually dialects.〔 This suggests that nascent ASL was highly affected by the other signing systems brought by the ASD students, despite the fact that the school's original director Laurent Clerc taught in FSL.〔〔 In fact, Clerc reported that he often learned the students' signs rather than conveying FSL:〔 It has been proposed that ASL is a creole with FSL as the superstrate language and with the native village sign languages as substrate languages. However, more recent research has shown that modern ASL does not share many of the structural features that characterize creole languages.〔 ASL may have begun as a creole and then undergone structural change over time, but it is also possible that it was never a creole-type language.〔 There are modality-specific reasons that sign languages tend towards agglutination, for example the ability to simultaneously convey information via the face, head, torso, and other body parts. This might override creole characteristics such as the tendency towards isolating morphology.〔 Additionally, Clerc and Gallaudet may have used an artificially constructed form of manually coded language in instruction rather than true FSL.〔 Although the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia share English as a common oral and written language, ASL is not mutually intelligible with British Sign Language (BSL) or Auslan. All three languages show degrees of borrowing from English, but this alone is not sufficient for cross-language comprehension.〔 It has been found that a relatively high percentage (37–44%) of ASL signs have similar translations in Auslan, which for oral languages would suggest that they belong to the same language family.〔 However, this does not seem justified historically for ASL and Auslan, and it is likely that this resemblance is due to the higher degree of iconicity in sign languages in general, as well as contact with English.〔 American Sign Language is growing in popularity among many states. Many people in high school and colleges wanting to take it as a foreign language, but until recently, it was not a creditable foreign language elective. The issue was that many didn't consider it a foreign language. ASL users, however, have a very distinct culture and way they interact when talking. Their facial expressions and hand movements reflect what they are conveying. They also have their own sentence structure which sets the language apart. American sign language is now being accepted by many colleges as a foreign language credit; many states are making it mandatory to accept it. American sign language can help young adults better connect with the deaf community. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「American Sign Language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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