Language Sciences is very excited to launch our new American Sign Language (ASL) course this summer! ASL is one of the world’s many signed languages used by Deaf and other individuals as their primary means of communication. ASL is the native language of many Deaf people in the United States.
Signed languages use a visual-gestural, rather than an auditory-vocal, modality to encode meaning, but otherwise are equivalent to spoken languages in terms of their structure, complexity, expressive ability and cultural significance. Signed languages are real, full, naturally occurring languages, that generally have no relationship to the spoken languages used in overlapping geographic areas. Signed languages have their own unique grammatical properties and vocabularies, just like spoken languages do.
Beginning this summer, ASL will be offered at UW-Madison as a full communicative language course that counts towards the L&S language requirement.
Linguistics 351: American Sign Language 1 will be offered this summer and again in Fall 2023.
We hope to expand the program to offer higher levels of ASL in future semesters.
Here is a page with more information about the new ASL offerings. EXCITED to LEARN!