You Will Learn Sign Language

∞ 56//SIGN LANGUAGE: It's Not All in the Hands ∞

Hello my lovely signers!

I hope you had an amazing Christmas filled with joy and love. That you had a lot of presents and you ate tons of food.

NOW, next up, I will show you a few more tips. So, I hope you find them really helpful. Remember that I take this information from websites, SO I AM NOT THE OWNER. Credits, as always, goes to the author of some ASL related article, or the Youtuber I present, etc.

Without firther ado, ENJOY!

Not actually 100% "sign" language

The first thing to note is that it is not actually all in the hands. People presume that sign language is just a more complex form of the game charades. The sign for house looks like a house, therefore every word looks in some way like what it describes, right?

The problem with this is that you can't sign concepts like if, since and so on so easily. But conventions mean that signs for these words do of course exist. You learn them and then you'll recognise and be able to use them, even if the reason they look they way they do may not be so apparent at first.

What I found much more interesting was discovering that a vast amount of sign language is not actually in how you shape or move your hands. There are several other factors at play, a few of which include:

Position: The sign for man & woman (or brother & sister) is actually the same if you just look at the hands and how they move or are shaped. But in fact, male words tend to be signed from or around the forehead, with female around the chin. There is a visual male/female separation of the top & bottom of the head. Similarly you sign from or to various parts of your body (usually your chest/arms/head area). A sign could look exactly the same but mean something different depending on where it is in reference to the signer's body.
Direction pointed: The palm of your dominant hand may be pointing up, down, left, right, to your body, away from your body or diagonally in some way. Where you point it  (as well as your non-dominant hand) is important for the meaning of the word.
Distance & how you move it. While someone could tell you the sign for a particular word, how you sign it would change based on context. To sign "really big", you would more likely sign big but separate your hands even more, while changing your facial expression accordingly. The sign for driving would change depending on how you are driving for example.
You quickly learn that you should actually have most of your focus on the person's FACE as they are signing. Of course their hands are crucial, but facial expressions introduce both important sense to a conversation (without them, it would be like listening to a monotone conversation in a spoken language) and actually dramatically affect the end-meaning.

Eyebrows: Raised eyebrows are used for Yes/No questions and when talking about something positive. When you furrow your brow this indicates you are asking a WH- question (why, where, when etc.) or perhaps talking about something negative.
With this in mind, the sign (i.e. what you do with your hands) is the same for Here and What. But you must furrow your brow when it's the latter (as I tried to demonstrate in the main photo of this post).

And the difference between "The weather is nice today" and "Is the weather nice today?" would be that the latter would include raised eyebrows since the words and order would be the same. Technically you can add in a question mark, but that is not needed most of the time, as it would be in English.

Mouth: As well as the ever important use of natural expressions, your mouth is used for contributing to actual meaning. For example, when indicating where something is, you open your mouth wide to imply that it's far, show your teeth to show that it's near and close your mouth (as if you were humming) for average distances. I've also seen people open and close their mouth very quickly (almost looking like a fish) to imply understanding, like "I see!"
There are even other ways you can express yourself using various facial muscles and even your tongue!