Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
GIRL
“girl”
How to make it
Draw the thumb of an 'A' hand down along your jawline.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The thumb traces the line of a bonnet's drawstring along the jaw — a girl's bonnet ribbon. Note the evidence is French: it is documented in 19th-century French Sign Language dictionaries (Puybonnieux 1846, Lambert 1865), from which ASL descends. American sources attest the form but not this origin.
Sources
- Puybonnieux 1846Puybonnieux, J.-B. Mutisme et surdité, ou Influence de la surdité native sur les facultés physiques, intellectuelles et morales. Paris, 1846.
- Lambert 1865Lambert, L.-M. Le langage de la physionomie et du geste mis à la portée de tous. Paris, 1865.
- 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
Cheek
Moves from the cheek to the jaw.
Movement
a straight path
One-handed.
Palm facing in.