Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
SISTER
“sister”
Make an 'L' hand at your jaw, then bring it down so both index fingers rest side by side.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
GIRL (at the female jaw locus) plus SAME, compounded and worn smooth — the mirror of BROTHER.
- Klima & Bellugi 1979Klima, Edward, and Ursula Bellugi. The Signs of Language. Harvard University Press, 1979.
- Frishberg 1975 (assimilation)Frishberg, Nancy. "Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language." Language 51, no. 3 (1975): 696–719. 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.
Starts as index up, thumb out — an l shape; ends as index finger up, the rest closed.
Also: letter L
Moves from the jaw to the neutral space.
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing left.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from SISTER in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.