A language has a history. So does every sign in it.

American Sign Language traces to 1817, when Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc — a Deaf teacher from Paris — founded the first permanent school for Deaf students in Hartford, Connecticut. Clerc brought French Sign Language, which mixed with the sign systems Deaf Americans were already using, including a rich village variety on Martha's Vineyard.

You'll often hear that ASL is “about 60% French.” That number does real damage to the truth. Sign-language historians count French influencerather than strict descent, because the usual methods of tracing language families don't apply the same way. And because most of Clerc's students arrived long after early childhood, ASL emerged through a break in the ordinary parent-to-child chain — it became its own language quickly, not a transplanted French.

In 1975 the linguist Nancy Frishberg showed that ASL signs drift in regular, describable ways — the same kind of systematic change spoken languages undergo. She identified a handful of tendencies:

1. 1
   Content moves to the hands. Information once carried by the whole body concentrates into the hands and face.
2. 2
   Signs shift within the signing space. Two-handed signs at the face spread outward; one-handed signs below the neck drift toward the center line.
3. 3
   Symmetry. When both hands move, they tend to take the same handshape and mirror each other.
4. 4
   Assimilation. In compounds, the parts blend — like HOME wearing down from EAT + SLEEP into one smooth sign.

Many signs start out iconic— they visibly resemble what they mean. But Frishberg's deeper point was that signs tend to lose that resemblance over time, trading a picture for a form that's faster and more systematic to produce. Iconicity is a starting point, not a permanent feature.

And iconic rarely means obvious. When researchers showed signs to people who didn't know ASL, they guessed the meaning only about a tenth of the time; most signs were never guessed at all. What iconic signs actually offer is translucency— they make sense once someone explains them. That's exactly why etymology is worth teaching: not because you could have guessed GIRL was a bonnet ribbon, but because once you know, it stays known.

The danger in teaching where signs come from is not making things up on purpose. It's repeating a plausible-sounding story so often that it hardens into “fact.” ASL teaching is full of these. Two of the most common are simply wrong:

This is why every etymology in our dictionary carries an evidence tier. A claim is either traced in scholarship, an attested older form, a present-day resemblance, a corrected myth — or honestly marked unknown. The authors of the field's authoritative etymological dictionary set the standard: they “resisted the temptation of proposing unsubstantiated claims for fear of perpetuating our own folk etymologies.”

Segregated schools produced a segregated language. For decades, Black Deaf children in the American South were taught in separate, underfunded schools — Louisiana didn't desegregate its Deaf schools until 1978 — and a distinct variety, Black ASL, developed and was passed down.

The landmark study of it, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL, reached a careful conclusion: the differences from mainstream ASL are quantitative rather than qualitative. Black ASL isn't slang, and it isn't a separate language. Among its documented features, it tends to use more two-handed forms and a larger signing space — in several respects it stays closer to older citation forms than mainstream ASL does.

A handful of older signs — some for countries and groups of people — encoded stereotypes, and the Deaf community has moved away from them. The signs for China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand, for instance, shifted around the late 1980s and early 1990s from forms based on facial features to forms based on each country's own sign for itself.

The important part is who drove the change. Linguists who studied it call these corrections— reforms that came from within the Deaf community, not political correctness imposed from outside. That distinction matters, and it's easy to get wrong: when a newspaper once reported this story carelessly, it had to print a correction of its own.

We show retired signs only where it teaches something, always labeled as historical, and defer to Deaf authority on what belongs in front of a learner. Which is the right note to end on.