Are sign languages real languages, or just mime?
For decades, linguists dismissed American Sign Language as gestures. A professor of medieval English literature proved them wrong.
▶ Start the storySign languages are real, full languages, with their own grammar and vocabulary. They are not spoken language acted out with the hands, and they are not a code for English. Signers use their hands together with their face and body, and linguists who have studied them find the same basic properties that every language has.
Mime is acting: you show a thing by copying it. A sign is a , something a community agreed on. Many signs look nothing like what they mean, just as most spoken words do not sound like their meaning. Signs can resemble their meaning more often than spoken words do, because the hands can draw in three-dimensional space, but the difference is a matter of degree, not a gap between two kinds of communication. Even the grammar is its own: in sentence structure, American Sign Language (ASL) has more in common with spoken Japanese than with English.
Mime
- Copies the thing itself
- Anyone could guess it
- Made up on the spot
A sign language
- Agreed conventions, often arbitrary
- Has to be learned
- Own grammar and vocabulary
The person who made this case in the United States was an unlikely one. William Stokoe had a PhD in English, specialising in literature, and in 1955 he arrived to head the English department at Gallaudet University At that time ASL was widely seen as something inferior to a real language. Stokoe studied it closely and argued that it shares the important features that spoken languages have. His 1960 book Sign Language Structure and his 1965 dictionary of ASL changed how linguists saw it.
One more myth deserves to go. Hearing teachers of deaf pupils are sometimes called the inventors of sign language. But like every , sign languages were developed by the people who use them: deaf people.
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Recap
Sign languages are conventions built by their communities, with their own grammar, so they are languages and not mime.
💡 A trick to remember it · Mime is a charade you guess; a sign language is a conversation you learn, like French or Japanese, only with hands.
Surprising fact · William Stokoe, who showed ASL is a true language, was an English professor who studied medieval literature.
Sources (3)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (15 claims) cites at least one of these.