Afterword
Meier
Names
In their 1988 book Deaf in America, Carol Padden and Tom Humphries discuss the
view that the Deaf community once had of signing. Nothing was called American Sign
Language or ASL; instead the language of Deaf people was simply “the sign language”
(pp. 60, 72).
However, when we identify a new planet, a new animal species, or a new language,
we like to have a distinctive name for it. Stokoe brought the attention of linguistics to a
heretofore unfamiliar language. He seems at first to have been uncertain as to how to refer
to this newly-identified language. In the 1960 imprint, he variously says: “the sign language
of the American deaf” (Sections 0 & 0.16), or “the American sign language” with the
definite article but without caps (Sections 0.13, 0.16, 0.21, 1.40, 1.404). The name
“American sign language”, without an article and without caps, appears just three times, as
best I can tell (Sections 0.12., 0.16, 0.21). 1 He wrote about “American signs” (as opposed
to ASL signs). By the time that Stokoe published the Dictionary of American Sign
Language (Stokoe, Casterline, & Croneberg, 1965), he had settled on “American sign
language” (p. ix, xxiii) or “the American sign language” (pp. vii, viii, & x). The
abbreviation “ASL” appears in the later pages of the introduction (and in the appendices).
In the 1976 preface to the new edition of DASL, Stokoe frequently refers to “ASL”.
How would we refer to the deaf users of the newly identified language? They are
Deaf, with the capital D signifying their cultural and linguistic allegiances (Woodward,
1975; Padden & Humphries, 1988). With the recognition of ASL as an independent
language and with awareness of the cultural traditions of Deaf signers, we have come to
understand that the Deaf are a minority community within the larger fabric of American
culture. We have also come to understand that, like other minority groups, the members of
the Deaf community have all-too-often suffered discrimination. Tom Humphries sought a
name for that discrimination; it was not racism or sexism but was instead “audism.”
Humphries wrote that “[n]aming it gives a better handle on it and makes it somehow less
frightening.” In her commentary, Erin Wilkinson suggests that the word conferred power
on deaf people: “Not only did the coinage of audism recognize deaf people’s struggle as
discriminated-against people, it also validated their frustrations over the discrimination and
oppression due to their deafness.”
Other suggestions for new terms have not taken root. Stokoe advocated a new label
for the study of the internal structure of signs: cherology; see his section 1.0. But this term
has not been adopted within linguistics. Instead, the prevailing belief within linguistics has
been that the internal structure of signs and words is fundamentally similar (although
perhaps not identical). Hence the English term phonology has been extended to the study
of the internal structure of signs. However, the Deaf community may now be making a
distinction between an initialized sign PHONOLOGY near the ear that refers to spoken
language and another sign PHONOLOGY that has a finger-wiggling movement of the
1
In subsequent printings of Stokoe’s paper, such as the 2005 reprinting in the Journal of Deaf Studies and
Deaf Education, some—but not all of these usages would be capitalized.
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