There’s a Philly Sign Language Accent | Smart News | Carlomaria Grassi

 ... when most people talk about a dialect, in
spoken languages and sign languages too, a lot of what they center on are
lexical differences, differences in words," Fisher tells PRI. "For example, the sign for
hospital is exceptionally different from what standard ASL would be, among
other things." She says that someone from another part of the country
wouldn’t recognize some of the signs used by Philly ASL signers. This
striking difference comes from how sign language came to the United States, the
researchers suspect. Before 1814, there was no standard American
Sign Language. That started to
change when a Connecticut minister, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, helped found a
school now known as the American School for the Deaf. The co-founder of the
school, Laurent Clerc, came from a school in Paris, so ASL is heavily influenced
by French Sign Language ...    There’s a Philly Sign Language Accent | Smart News | Smithsonian