ABSTRACT
In the past, sign languages were generally ignored, not only in mainstream society, but also in linguistic research. The main reason for this indifference was that sign languages were not considered to be genuine natural languages. Before the start of modern sign linguistics, it was often assumed that all deaf people across the world used a kind of universal, primitive system of gestures and pantomime. At the same time, many people seemed (and some still seem) to believe that “sign language” is nothing but a word for word transliteration of the local spoken language in which the signs are produced simultaneously with the spoken (content) words. Neither assumption is correct and these false beliefs only gradually started to change after the publication of the book Sign Language Structure by the American linguist William Stokoe in 1960. One of the effects of the publication was that interest into sign linguistics was steadily aroused, and today, even though still not all linguists and nonlinguists are equally convinced of the linguistic status of sign languages, linguistic research into sign languages has conquered a solid position in various linguistic subdisciplines. Among other things, Stokoe maintained in this book that the signs used in American Sign Language (or ASL) should not be considered unanalyzable wholes but should be regarded as consisting of various smaller meaning-distinguishing component parts. As such he was the first to show that a sign language exhibits duality of patterning, exactly as is the case for spoken languages. * ASL could be considered a genuine human language as in mainstream linguistics duality of patterning is considered to be a:
defining property of human language, which sees language as structurally organized into two abstract levels; also called double articulation. At one level, language is analysed into combinations of meaningful units (such as words and sentences); at the other level, it is analysed as a sequence of phonological segments which lack meaning. (Crystal, 1999, p. 94)
