Last week, we looked at a feature I wrote about my school’s American Sign Language class. We saw how their outreach programs were welcomed by the senior citizen community; we discussed the impact and importance of spreading a language to people.

This week, we’ll talk more closely about American Sign Language.

American Sign Language, like any other sign language, doesn’t actually parallel the spoken language of the country where it originates from. For example, the grammar of spoken English is very different from that of ASL. We will cover word order more in depth during a later chapter, but we can look at it briefly for now. Spoken English uses Subject-Verb-Object word order (SVO), which means that our sentences have a subject first, a verb second, and an object last. A sentence usually says something like “Sally ate the cookie,” with Sally (the subject) coming before “ate” (the verb), which comes before “the cookie” (the object).

With ASL, however, many different word orders are used; it really depends on what is needed in the specific context of each situation. In addition, ASL does not use “be” verbs like “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” or “were.” On top of that, it does not use articles like “a,” “an,” or “the.”

While some ASL conversations use SVO word order, most use the Time-Subject-Verb-Object word order. In this, the time frame of a sentence is established at the beginning of that sentence; this is the ASL way to talk in the present, past, and future tenses.

If you were to say “I cleaned my room last week” in spoken English, you would sign “Week-past I clean my room” or “My room? Week-past I clean.” Whether you choose the first option or the second depends on the conversation.

To figure this out, you need to establish your topic first. Your topic is what you are talking about, and you can either make it the subject or the object (of the sentence). After you know what your topic is, you can take a look at the Topic-Comment Format of ASL sentences. As you know, the topic is the first thing mentioned in a sentence; the comment, on the other hand, is what describes the topic.

Let’s go back to Sally and the cookie. “Sally” is the subject of the sentence; if we were to make “Sally” our topic, the sentence would read “Sally eat cookie.” It has an SVO word order. This is an active voice because the subject is our topic. Our comment is “eat cookie,” since we are talking about Sally.

If we made the object, or “cookie,” our topic, we would be using a passive voice. The sentence would read “cookie, Sally ate,” and the word order would be O,SV. “Cookie” is our topic, and “Sally eat” is the comment we are making about the cookie. In spoken English, a passive voice in this context would sound like “The cookie was eaten by Sally.”

As you can see, ASL grammar has rules that are very different from spoken English grammar. Just as English speakers use these rules to better convey meaning, ASL users will sign in different word orders to emphasize different parts of a sentence.

When I sat in on the ASL class at my school, I listened to the ASL students talk about some difficulties they faced when they were teaching the language to senior citizens. One big issue was that it was hard to explain ASL grammars to a non-speaker, as many senior citizens would ask about the signs for “the,” “is,” or “am.”

ASL students were not quite sure how to convey to their senior partners that ASL does not use these words since they were not needed in ASL word order. In the end, however, the senior citizens caught on to how sentences were constructed and signed.

Next week, we will look at some ASL history. Hope you’re ready to delve deep!