Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
FATHER
“father”
How to make it
Touch the thumb of an open '5' hand to your forehead.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The male counterpart to MOTHER: identical handshape raised to the forehead, ASL's male locus. See MOTHER for the full gendered-space account.
Sources
- Frishberg 1975Frishberg, Nancy. "Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language." Language 51, no. 3 (1975): 696–719. link
- Shaw & Delaporte 2011Shaw, Emily, and Yves Delaporte. A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language. Gallaudet University Press, 2015 (research 2011). 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
Forehead
Made at the forehead.
Movement
a tap
One-handed.
Palm facing left.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from FATHER in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.