Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
PHONE
“phone / call”
How to make it
Hold a 'Y' hand to the side of your face, thumb at the ear and pinky at the mouth.
Grammar
A good example of a sign whose iconicity is fading: children who have never held a handset learn it as an arbitrary form.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
A telephone handset — the Y hand spans ear to mouth. The image is a landline, and the sign has outlived the object; the corpus label is CALL-ON-PHONE.
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
Ear
Made at the ear.
Movement
held in place
One-handed.
Palm facing in.