William Stokoe played a transformative role in the recognition of ASL as its own independent language as, before his research, ASL was regarded as a mere pictorial version of English. While teaching at Gallaudet University, the world’s leading university for deaf and hard of hearing students, Stokoe began closely studying the structure of ASL, recognizing patterns and linguistic rules that his collegues didn't, suggesting ASL functioned similarly to spoken languages. His observations led him to develop the Stokoe notation system, which became the first widely recognized written system for documenting ASL. This system transcribed the phonemes, or parameters, of ASL including handshape, location, palm orientation, movement, and non-manual markers/signals into a recognizable linguistic format providing undeniable evidentce that ASL was a language of its own, independent of English. It contradicted the longstanding beliefs of the oralist movement that emphasized teaching deaf individuals to lip read and speak verbally, discouraging the use of sign language and promoting it as inferior to English. Stokoe essentially helped validate ASL as a language and prompted further linguistiic study of the language.
Below is an example of Stokoe's notation system:
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