When I went deaf 40 years ago and learned sign language, I was quickly told that the sign language that I learned was fake, and that I was polluting the real ASL. This came from The Deaf Community (capital D). more on that later. This will take a little explaining, so bear with me.

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There are two distinct groups of deaf people in the U.S. The one group of the deaf are called late-deafened. Those are people who went deaf later in life. They make up about 80% of the total deaf. A big majority of this group are seldom around others who are deaf and therefore never learn to sign. Those who do learn sign language most often learn “Signed English” as I did.

Another group are pre-lingual, that is they went deaf before they were able to acquire a spoken language. About 90% of this population are born from hearing parents and at least in the last three decades often have cochlear implants to allow them to join the hearing world.

Of the total deaf population it is estimated that about 3% are self proclaimed members of the “Deaf Community” (with a capital D).

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Getting back to the idea of fake sign language. It was one from the Deaf Community that told me that learning to sign in English pollutes true ASL that they use. ASL is very different from the English language. ASL uses a topic-comment structure, visual space, and facial expressions for grammar. Signed English follows strict English sentence structure.

 
Finally, getting back to the main purpose of this post, after my “talk” with the Deaf Community person about his belief that Signed English is fake, it dawned on me that ASL itself is by no means the first sign language used in America. In fact, sign language has been around for a thousand years or more before ASL came to America’s shores. A big part of original American Sign Language users were from the Navajo population, but there were about 40 over versions in the true Native-American population.

So, maybe my version of sign language is a fake version of ASL, but ASL is certainly a fake sign language compared to the original version of signing in Native America.