Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
AUNT
“aunt”
How to make it
Hold an 'A' hand beside your jaw and give it a small shake.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
Initialized with A, placed at the female locus on the lower face. UNCLE is the U at the male locus — the letter and the gender map do all the work.
Sources
- Battison 1978 (initialization)Battison, Robbin. Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press, 1978.
- Frishberg 1975Frishberg, Nancy. "Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language." Language 51, no. 3 (1975): 696–719. link
The sign, taken apart
Every ASL sign is built from a handshape, a place it's made, and a movement. Learn to see these three and you can read and store any sign.
Location
Jaw
Made at the jaw.
Movement
wiggling fingers
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing out.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from AUNT in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.