aw-hawkeye-no:

iamshadow21
replied to your post “Y’all I had the most supremely shitty day – anyone got fluffy…”

Barney and Clint’s signing is superbasic and poorly taught (by a hearing person) ASL augmented with a fuckton of homesign they just made up, so when Clint’s using ASL with a regular deaf person it’s pretty normal, if stiff and antiquated with weird grammar, but his sign with Barney is the sign equivalent of a madeup language like Klingon. They’re the only two speakers of it in the world, which makes for its own subset of weird pun-signs, creative swearing and invention.

OKAY but do you think Nat and/or Bucky learn formal ASL to speak with Clint, or do they pick up his random excited, pun-filled babble he has with Barney?

I think Nat picked up Clint’s unique sign SUPER FAST, after the first few times Clint got wasted with her and started making jokes in sign rather than speech. (*tries to explain joke* “Oh, wait, that doesn’t work in words, let me teach you this in sign so you understand why it’s hilarious.” etc) Clint has absolutely given her a namesign that he is under orders from her never to explain to hearing people.

I think Bucky also picked it up fast, but he mainly uses it to come up with new ways of telling Clint what a dumpster fire and dumbass he is, and also to trash talk when they’re using the range together with ear defenders on (or while in actual combat situations).

(I may have an interest in sign language and have written a Clint/Phil series that heavily deals with Clint’s deafness and deaf identity.)