AAVSL (African American Venacular Sign Language) is wild because you really see the culture in it and if you are Black and hearing/don’t know ASL, you still understand it because so much of black communicatiom is nonverbal
Reblogging again because I didn’t know AAVE had a sign language equivalent even though now it makes so much sense.
Squirrel Girl texts with Bucky in Squirrel Meets World by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale
I have just started reading this and the first friend Doreen makes after Tippy-Toe is a Deaf girl at her new school! Doreen tries talking to her in the cafeteria, and the girl shuts her down, saying she can’t understand her over the din. (Hearing aids suck in loud environments, yo.) So, rather than being deterred, Doreen goes home and brushes up HARD on the ASL that she learnt from her Deaf cousin, and tries again the next day. After being startled at Doreen knowing sign, she tentatively accepts her friendship.
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.)
the asl sign for “transgender“ is basically the same as the sign for ”beautiful“ but signed at the chest instead of in front of the face.
so that’s cool.
this is my imperfect not-a-fluent-signer understanding but:
(based on a presentation by a deaf trans guy i was at in 2005 where he was promoting that sign)
it seems like that sign was invented and implemented by trans people over the last 10-ish years. before that the predominant vocabulary was “sex change” and then some deaf trans people were like “yo fuck that” and came up with the current sign, which starts off with the sign for “myself,” then motion that indicates both change and coming together, and ends with the closed hand held against the sternum.
and in the process it also mimics the sign for “beautiful”
and because of spatial grammar, things closer to the front of your body in ASL are generally more vital, more emphatic, more immediate, more present.
so it’s actually a case where the word coherently indicates “beauty” and “self transformation” and contains hints of the complete thought of “my self transforming, through a coming together of disparate factors, into something more real, immediate, and vital than I was before.”
so yeah. that’s just fuckin’ awesome.
and that’s just the way to express that concept now.
knitting in the dark 