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The History of Sign Language

In the early 1500s, people who were deaf were overlooked and neglected. Nobody

respected them because they were unable to communicate with the rest of the world.

This all changed in the 16th century when an Italian physician, Geronimo Cardano,

declared that the deaf community should be taken care of and educated on how to

communicate with the world. He added that the deaf could be taught to communicate

their thoughts and ideas through pictures and symbols rather than words and phrases.

This proclamation compelled Juan Pablo de Bonet to create and publish the first book on

sign language in 1620 (Butterworth & Flodin, 1995). The concept and idea of educating

the deaf took off like wild fire, and spread throughout France. In Paris, in 1755, Abbe

Charles Michel de LEppe created the first sign language school that was at no cost to the

students. His ideas led to the creation of fingerspelling, and gestures that represented

whole phrases or words.

ASL has many roots. Not only is it rooted in the French ideas, but also the ideas

of the Great Plains Indians in America (Butterworth & Flodin, 1995). The man

responsible for bringing sign language to light in the United States is Thomas Hopkins

Gallaudet. Gallaudet studied the French ways and returned to America in 1817 where he

founded the first school for the deaf in America, near present day Hartford, Connecticut.

In the following years deaf schools opened up in New York and Pennsylvania, with a

total of 22 schools across the United States by 1863. In 1864, the biggest milestone for

the deaf community occurred in Washington, D.C. The only liberal arts college for the

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in New England; 2,000 in the

1818 there were 31 pupils.

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1830) Laurent Clerc (1840)

George Veditz (1913)

e popular among educators of the deaf, who believed the best way to educate studentswas to use ASL, English, demonstration, pictures, indeed any language, code, or symbol.The goal was to guide children toward English as their primary language, and several signsystems of manually coded English were developed for this use.

1818 there were 31 pupils.

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Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1830) Laurent Clerc (1840)

out to be no threat at all, as children simply restricted their signing to safe places with like-minded people.

George Veditz (1913)