American Sign Language

"ASL" redirects here. For other uses, see ASL (disambiguation).

"Canadian Sign Language" redirects here. For French Canadian Sign Language, see Quebec Sign Language. For the sign language specific to Canada's Atlantic provinces, see Maritime Sign Language. For the Native American sign language, see Hand Talk. For Australian sign language, see Auslan.

American Sign Language
Visual American Sign Language
Native to	United States, Canada
Region	Northern America
Signers	Native signers: 730,000 (2006) L2 signers: 130,000 (2006)
Language family	Francosign Mixed: LSF, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, and Hand Talk Home signs American Sign Language
Dialects	Protactile Black American Sign Language see Varieties of American Sign Language
Writing system	None widely accepted si5s (ASLwrite), ASL-phabet, Stokoe notation, SignWriting
Official status
Official language in	None
Recognised minority language in	Through legislation: Canada (federal); Saskatchewan (provincial); Ontario (provincial) only in domains of: legislation, education and judiciary proceedings. through resolutions: Alberta, Manitoba. 45 US states and DC formally recognize ASL in state law; Five states recognize ASL for educational foreign language requirements, but have not formally recognized ASL as a language.
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ase
Glottolog	asli1244  ASL family amer1248  ASL proper
Areas where ASL or a dialect or derivative is the national sign language   Areas where ASL is in significant use alongside another sign language
Map of the North American Francosign languages. ASL covers the regions enclosed by the dashed line.

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology. ASL is not based on English. ASL is not a universal language; there are between 200 and 300 officially recognized signed languages around the world, and ASL is one of those languages.