History of ASL

    In the 1500's, Geronimo Cardano, a physician of Padua, in northern Italy, stated that deaf people can be taught to understand  symbols by associating them with the thing they represented. The first book that was written to teach sign language to deaf people that contained the manual alphabet was written Juan Pablo de Bonet in 1620.

    The first free deaf school was founded in 1755 by Abbe Charles Michel de L’Epee of Paris.  He taught that deaf people could communicate through a system of gestures, hand signs, and fingerspelling.  He created and demonstrated a language of signs where each sign would represent the concept desired.

    Samuel Heinicke of Leipzig, Germany taught speech and speechreading in 1778. He established the first public school for deaf people that achieved government recognition. These two methods (manual and oral) were the forerunners of today's concept of total communication. Total communication espouses the use of all means of available communication, such as sign language, gesturing, fingerspelling, speechreading, speech, hearing aids, reading, writing, and pictures.

    The Great Plains Indians of America created a sign language within their tribe for communication.  While there are few traces of the language still remaining today, it is interesting to see the similarities between Indiana sign language and the present system of sign.

    Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet made a huge mark on sign language in America.  He was a Congregational minister who sought to understand a way of communicating with deaf people in order to help his neighbor's young deaf daughter, Alice Cogswell.  He traveled to Europe in 1815 in hopes of studying methods of deaf communication.  Abbe Roche Ambroise Sicard invited Gallaudet to study at the school for the deaf he had founded in Paris.  Laurent Clerc, a deaf sign language instructor from the Paris school, came to the United States with Gallaudet.

    Gallaudet founded the nation's first school for deaf people in Hartford, Connecticut in 1817.  Clerc became the first deaf sign language teacher in the United States.  School began appearing in many states.  There were twenty-two schools established in the United States by the year 1863.

    The most famous deaf school known in the United States today is Gallaudet College in Washington D.C.  It was established in 1864 and remains to this day the only liberal arts college for deaf people in the United States and in the World.  The college was not founded by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet but he passed his dream of a deaf college onto his son.  His son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, and Amos Kendall created the deaf college.  Amos Kendall became the first president of Gallaudet College.

    Much of our sign language has been derived from the French sign language system.  The United States has one of the most developed sign language systems in the world and it continues to gain popularity.  Thanks to the continued interest in sign language, it is now the fourth most used language in the United States.