Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
MOTHER
“mother”
Touch the thumb of an open '5' hand to your chin.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
ASL places female-associated signs low on the face (chin/jaw) and male-associated signs high (forehead/temple). MOTHER sits on the chin, FATHER on the forehead — the same handshape, moved between the two gendered zones. This locus contrast is documented, not incidental.
- 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.
Made at the chin.
One-handed.
Palm facing left.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from MOTHER in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.