Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
HAPPY
“happy”
How to make it
Brush a flat hand upward on your chest in a repeated circular pat — rising feeling.
Grammar
Emotion signs are almost always carried by facial expression as much as the hands. A flat, neutral face reads as sarcasm or negation, not happiness.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Warmth and lightness rising in the chest. Many emotion signs are located on the chest, over the heart.
Sources
- ASL-LEX (iconicity)Sehyr, Zed Sevcikova, Naomi Caselli, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, and Karen Emmorey. "The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language." Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 26, no. 2 (2021): 263–277. 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
Chest
Made at the chest.
Movement
a brushing motion + a circle
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing in.