With all the new slangs and phrases that come pop up all the time, how do those who communicate through sign language keep up with it all? Do they create new hand signals for new words/phrases like “fo-sheezy”?? Is there such thing as sign language ebonics? I was just wondering about that.
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Probably not exactly what your looking for but :
http://www.transbuddha.com/alphamonkey/signlanguage/
i know what you are talking about, i am deaf.
all you have to go around with them more and you will be able to pick it up.
good luck.
Well I know a lot of Deaf people don’t really pick up on hearing slang unless they are very immersed with hearing young people – for example mainstreamed into a hearing school, or married to a hearing person..If they’re hard of hearing, they might pick up on spoken slang phrases, but completely Deaf people aren’t going to hear these phrases, so they don’t know or use them. Sign language has some of its own slang. So Deaf people are more likely to create ASL slang than create new signs for spoken English slang phrases. Mostly when interpreters intepret slang, we interpret the meaning. For example “bling” is interpreted big shiney jewelry. etc…Vice versa if a Deaf person was signing about a person wearing big shiny jewelry, and it was a young person from that generation, I might voice for them “bling”. but if an old person signed the same thing, I wouldn’t use that slang because an older person would not use that slang word.
As far as ebonics goes…in my experience, some African American Deaf people have a bit of a different style of signing, but it’s not really different grammatically from ASL. More of a difference in body language and facial expression. I haven’t seen anything I would call sign language ebonics.