How Sign Language Evolves as Our World Does

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They’re using it to transform American Sign Language.

This is how a deaf person in America would have signed “phone” 100 years ago, when telephones looked like candlesticks.

A woman in a black shirt with colorful earrings mouths the word “phone,” as she holds up her right hand in a sideways fist close to her mouth, and her left hand in a forward-facing fist next to her ear. The video loops, and the second time it plays, an illustration of a candlestick telephone appears over her hands.

As receivers and speakers were combined into one handset, the sign changed to mirror the technology’s new look.

A woman in a black shirt and glasses mouths the word “phone,” as she holds her right hand up to just below her ear. Her right hand is in a Y shape – the middle three fingers are closed, but her pinky extends outward along the curve of her jaw, and her thumb extends up to the top of her ear. The video loops, and the second time it plays, an illustration of a telephone headset appears over her hands.

Today, some people sign “phone” as if they are holding a smartphone. But the rise of smartphones hasn’t just changed this one sign.

A man in a pink shirt raises his right hand to his cheek. His fingers are curved into a c-shape, as if he is holding a smartphone, and he touches the tips of his fingers to his cheek. The video loops, and the second time it plays, an illustration of a cell phone appears over his hand.

How a Visual Language Evolves as Our World Does

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They’re using it to transform American Sign Language.

By Amanda Morris
Amanda Morris is a child of deaf adults who uses hearing aids and learned ASL at home. She conducted many of the interviews for this story in sign language.

Videos by Mohamed Sadek and Ege Soyuer

For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning. Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens. Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required. Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language — there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok — and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking. “These innovations are popping up far more frequently than they were before,” said Emily Shaw, who studies the evolution of ASL at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the leading college for the deaf in America. The pace of innovation, while thrilling for some, has also begun to drive a wedge between generations of Deaf culture. Perhaps the most dramatic example: To accommodate the tight space of video screens, signs are shrinking. “My two daughters sign in such a small space, and I’m like, can you please stretch it out a little?” said E. Lynn Jacobowitz, 69, a former president of the American Sign Language Teachers Association. “We chat on FaceTime sometimes, and their hands are so crunched up to fit on the tiny phone screen, and I’m like, ‘What are you saying?’” The problem is familiar to Dr. Shaw, 44, and her wife, who is Deaf. (Just as there can be different signs for the same thing, Deaf is capitalized by some people in references to a distinct cultural identity.) They have four children, ranging in age from 7 to 19, who often use the language differently — signing with one hand, for instance, for words that she and her wife might typically make with both. “When they’re talking with each other, and with their peers,” she said, “I have a very hard time following the conversation.”

A man in a gray jacket and glasses pats the side of his right thigh a few times with his right hand in an open palm. The video loops, and the second time it plays, an illustration of a dog raising its head and wagging its tail as the man taps his thigh appears next to his leg.

# Source props

This is one well-known older sign for “dog,” which evokes the act of calling a pet to your side. It takes up more space and isn’t easy to see on small screens.

A newer, tighter version of the sign is based on the finger spelling of the word. The letters “D” and “G” are repeated twice, making the sign also look like a person snapping for a dog’s attention.

This is one well-known older sign for “dog,” which evokes the act of calling a pet to your side. It takes up more space and isn’t easy to see on small screens.

A newer, tighter version of the sign is based on the finger spelling of the word. The letters “D” and “G” are repeated twice, making the sign also look like a person snapping for a dog’s attention.

A woman in a black shirt and hoop earrings raises her right hand and extends her thumb, middle finger and pointer finger, while keeping her other fingers bent downward. She puts her thumb on her middle finger, creating the letter “d” in ASL, then puts her thumb on her pointer finger, creating the letter “g” in ASL. She repeats this snapping-like motion twice. The video loops, and the second time the video plays, the letters “d” and “g” appear as she does the sign.

Even the oldest signs in ASL are still relatively young, by language standards. American Sign Language was heavily influenced by French Sign Language, but it wasn’t standardized or formalized until the American School for the Deaf was founded in 1817. The number of people who use it is difficult to quantify (ASL isn’t an option on Census forms), but in 2006, researchers estimated that it was probably around 500,000. From the beginning, signs that were more complex or crossed more zones of the body have tended to fall out of favor, experts said. But small screens appear to be accelerating that trend, both by encouraging tighter gestures and giving the new versions a way to spread quickly — just like a new dance move on TikTok. “If a person sees someone they like on social media using a new sign, they might think it’s better and adopt it,” said Ted Supalla, a Deaf linguist who has researched the evolution of sign languages. “That’s a challenge for the community, because it’s a different kind of language transmission.” Unlike spoken languages, American Sign Language is not typically passed down through generations of a family. More than 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, so they have tended to learn from institutions or their peers rather than parents. That creates a higher degree of variation between different generations of deaf people than is typical with spoken languages, said Julie A. Hochgesang, a Deaf linguist at Gallaudet University who maintains an ASL sign bank that documents variations in ASL. For a portion of the 20th century, many schools for the deaf were more inclined to try to teach their students spoken English, rather than ASL, based on harmful beliefs that signing was inferior to spoken language. Today, with ASL on the upswing, young people might be learning it from Chrissy Marshall, 22, a deaf TikTok influencer living in the Los Angeles area. ASL has its own rules of grammar, but in her videos, she sometimes adapts her signs to more closely follow the English rules that her viewers might know better. Those kinds of changes don’t sit well with everyone. MJ Bienvenu, 69, of Austin, Texas, quit an 87,000-member ASL Facebook group because she said too many people were using newly invented signs that didn’t fit the language’s existing guidelines. “Many people were inventing signs that didn’t make sense,” said Dr. Bienvenu, who is a retired Deaf studies professor. “I feel like many people don’t realize that they bastardize ASL, and it harms more than it helps.”