According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), “American Sign Language is a complete, complex language that employs signs made by moving the hands combined with facial expressions and postures of the body.” While American Sign Language (ASL) is the primary language of most deaf North Americans, it is also used by people who are hard-of-hearing. Just like the spoken language, sign language is not universal. In fact, American Sign Language is based on the methods of the French. Also, the immigrants in Massachusetts had their own sign language known as Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, which is very likely to have been absorbed into ASL (Nomeland and Nomeland, 2012).
“Although the first formalization