- "American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada."
This covers the American version of sign language, which makes use of hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language.
- "ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. 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 most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF."
- "ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact."
- "ASL use has been propagated widely by schools for the deaf and Deaf community organizations."
- "Reliable estimates for American ASL users range from 250,000 to 500,000 persons, including a number of children of deaf adults and other hearing individuals."
- "ASL signs have a number of phonemic components, such as movement of the face, the torso, and the hands."
- "ASL is not a form of pantomime although iconicity plays 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 language."
- "ASL use has been propagated widely by schools for the deaf and Deaf community organizations."
- "ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca."
- "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 a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features."
- "ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology."
- "Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken."
- "ASL is not a form of pantomime although iconicity plays a larger role in ASL than in spoken languages."
- "American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada."
- "However, there are several alternative proposals to account for ASL word order."