“English is not my first language,” writes Nakia
Smith on her
TikTok account, although the 22 year old grew up in Texas. The
young African American woman has been deaf since birth, and uses her large
online following to promote her little-known dialect: Black American Sign
Language.
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In her video clips, she tells her 400,000 followers about
the differences between her language and the standard American Sign Language
(
ASL).
Among other things, she signs with two hands rather than
one, uses more space and makes more use of facial expressions.
Smith tells her followers that to sign “paper” in ASL, a
person mimics a sheet of paper by tapping the left hand with the right hand,
while moving the latter outwards. In Black American Sign Language, the person
waves both thumbs outwards at shoulder level.
“Black ASL came from ASL, but has more seasoning. It’s more
emotionally involved,” she told AFP, with her brother acting as interpreter.
“Growing up I learned to sign by watching older people in my
family. Then when I went to school my friends didn’t understand what I was
signing. I realized that BASL was unique and wanted to put it out there for
people to learn it,” she said.
Great variety
Those differences were also noted decades ago by Carolyn
McCaskill, a professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, one of the
largest institutions for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in the world.
As a child in Alabama, she first learned sign language at a
school for deaf Black children, before going to study at a school for white
children once segregation ended.
“The signing they used was so different, even though the
schools were only 10 minutes away from each other,” she said.
The earliest schools for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in the
United States date from the early 1800s, but in 17 southern states and
Washington, separate schools for Black students were established towards the
turn of the century. In these 18 establishments, a distinct means of communicating
through signs evolved organically from ASL.
These schools lasted for some 70 years, until desegregation,
which was long enough to allow the emergence of a dialect with its own
characteristics.
For her book, “The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL” McCaskill
interviewed dozens of deaf African Americans to catalog the specifics of the
dialect.
Thanks to the geographic remoteness of the communities,
American Black Sign Language enjoys a rich variety, and some signs differ from
one part of the American South to the next. Some remember a dire lack of
resources at their schools, and untrained teachers who did not teach them the
full diversity of standard American Sign Language.
“We Black students were repetitive, we lacked variety, our
sign language was quite limited,” recalled Pamela Baldwin, who went to school
in Arkansas during and after segregation, in an interview with McCaskill.
That lack of resources explains the informality of a dialect
that relies on a range of communication elements rather than the sole use of
pre-established signs.
Emotional vs... robotic
“Black people sign with more rhythm, more style, using words
that reveal our emotions, more free-flowing,” one former deaf Black student
from Texas said during a conversation posted online by McCaskill as part of her
research.
“We match the flavor. I don’t mean to offend white people,
but their signs lack affect, it has no tone, it’s robotic-like signing that
shows no emotion.”
Today, Black American Sign Language survives primarily by
being passed on from generation to generation, as in the case of Smith, who
learned it from her grandfather. This makes it almost impossible to estimate
how many people actually speak it, said McCaskill.
“We have older Black deaf individuals who are passing away
due to aging, but it’s very vibrant, the younger generation wants to preserve
the language,” she said.
McCaskill launched the nation’s first-ever Black deaf
studies center in 2020 with colleagues at Gallaudet, which offers a minor in
the history and culture of deaf African Americans.
She hopes her center will serve as a base for the
preservation of the dialect, but recognizes the importance of figures like
Nakia Smith and her popularity on
social media.
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