““I have to make sure my hands are not ashy before I sign,” Nakia Smith, who is deaf, explained to her nearly 400,000 followers.
In one of the dozens of popular videos she posted to TikTok last year, Ms. Smith compared her habit of adding a quick dab of lotion to her hands before she starts signing to the sip of water a hearing person takes before beginning to speak.
Since Ms. Smith created her account last April, the small ritual has caught millions of eyes, drawing attention to a corner of the internet steeped in the history and practice of a language that some scholars say is too frequently overlooked: Black American Sign Language, or BASL.
Variations and dialects of spoken English, including what linguists refer to as African-American English, have been the subject of intensive study for years. But research on Black ASL, which differs considerably from American Sign Language, is decades behind, obscuring a major part of the history of sign language.
About 11 million Americans consider themselves deaf or hard of hearing, according to the Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey, and Black people make up nearly 8 percent of that population. Carolyn McCaskill, founding director of the Center for Black Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, a private university in Washington for the deaf and hard of hearing, estimates that about 50 percent of deaf Black people use Black ASL.
Now, young Black signers are celebrating the language on social media, exposing millions to the history of a dialect preserved by its users and enriched by their lived experiences.
Nuances of Black ASL
Users of Black ASL are often confronted with the assumption that their language is a lesser version of contemporary ASL, but several scholars say that Black ASL is actually more aligned with early American Sign Language, which was influenced by French sign language.
Ms. Smith, whose sign name is Charmay, has a simple explanation of how the two languages differ: “The difference between BASL and ASL is that BASL got seasoning,” she said.
Compare ASL with Black ASL and there are notable differences: Black ASL users tend to use more two-handed signs, and they often place signs around the forehead area, rather than lower on the body.
“Here you have a Black dialect developed in the most oppressive conditions that somehow, in many respects, wound up to be more standard than the white counterpart,” said Robert Bayley, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Davis.
As white deaf schools in the 1870s and 1880s moved toward oralism — which places less emphasis on signing and more emphasis on teaching deaf students to speak and lip-read — Black signers better retained the standards of American Sign Language, and some white sign language instructors ended up moving to Black deaf schools.
According to Ceil Lucas, a sociolinguist and professor emerita at Gallaudet University, many white deaf schools were indifferent to Black deaf students’ education.
“The attitude was, ‘We don’t care about Black kids,’” she said. “‘We don’t care whether they get oralism or not — they can do what they want.’ And so these children benefited by having white deaf teachers in the classroom.”
Some Black signers also tend to use a larger signing space and emote to a greater degree when signing when compared with white signers. Over time, Black ASL has also incorporated African-American English terms. For example, the Black ASL sign for “tight” meaning “cool,” which comes from Texas, is not the same as the conceptual sign for “tight,” meaning snug or form-fitting. There are also some signs for everyday words like “bathroom,” “towel” and “chicken” that are completely different in ASL and Black ASL, depending on where a signer lives or grew up.
The same way Black hearing people adjust how they speak “to meet the needs” of their white counterparts, Black ASL users employ a similar mechanism depending on their environment, according to Joseph Hill, an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
As one of the first Black students to attend the Alabama School for the Deaf, Dr. McCaskill said code switching allowed her to fit in with white students, while also preserving her Black ASL style.
“We kept our natural way of communicating to the point where many of us code-switched unconsciously,” she said.
Ms. Smith said she noticed that others communicated differently from her around middle school, when she attended a school that primarily consisted of hearing students.
“I started to sign like other deaf students that don’t have deaf family,” said Ms. Smith, whose family has had deaf relatives in four of the last five generations. “I became good friends with them and signed like how they signed so they could feel comfortable.”
Remarking on how her relatives sign — her grandfather Jake Smith Jr. and her great-grandparents Jake Smith Sr. and Mattie Smith have all been featured on her TikTok — Ms. Smith notes that they still tend to use signs they learned growing up.
Generational differences often emerge when Ms. Smith’s older relatives try to communicate with her friends or when they need help communicating at doctor’s appointments, she said, exemplifying how Black ASL has evolved over generations.
Much like any Black experience, Black deaf people’s experiences with Black ASL vary from person to person, and seldom neatly fit into what others expect it to be.”
