When new words like “internet” or “email” emerge there comes a point when they end up in an official dictionary. Even before that if you’ve seen the word written and gotten a general sense of the meaning you can write and speak it yourself. But who comes up with the sign-language version of new words, how do they disseminate through the ASL community, and who makes the new sign “official”?
Well, where do new english words come from? What makes new english words “official”? There is no body charged with admitting or rejecting signs, any more than there is such a body charged with admitting or rejecting english words. Dictionaries don’t make english words official, they simply document how people actually use english words.
Signs get introduced when signers feel the need for a new sign and invent one, and they use it with the people around them. If the sign is a useful one it spreads, if not it remains “home sign”. A very common way for new signs is to take an existing sign and do it with an initialized hand shape.
Note that english tends to include a lot of words with very subtle distinctions in meaning…huge, giant, enormous, big, ginormous, and so forth. And there is no exact translation of each and every synomym for “big” into ASL, any more than there is an exact translation of each and every synomym into spanish. But in ASL shades of meaning can be conveyed by positioning, speed, repitition, size, and so forth. So a really big signing of “big” means “really big”, a really tiny signing of “small” means “really small”, and so forth.
But say a couple of different signs for, say, “internet” become popular regionally. Is there some governing body of ASL that decides what the official sign should be, or is it all a matter of the sign that is the easiest and/or most effective eventually winning by virtue of superior speaker-to-speaker spread? And is there a sign dictionary that documents existing usages?
(There is an official governing body for the French language, for example.)
No, there is no such governing body for ASL. Yes, different signs could be invented and compete against each other until one or the other wins out. There are regional variations in ASL, some signs being more common on the east coast or west coast for instance.
In some ways the signing community is isolated, but in others its very connected. It’s very easy to recognize a group of signers and go up and introduce yourself. And if you go a college cafeteria and pick out the most ethnically diverse table, that table will invariably be the deaf table.
Thanks, Lemur! I’ve wondered this for years. Finally I can sleep at night.