Unbeknown to many hearing people, almost every country has their own sign language which, due to physical barriers, such as mountains and seas, centers of deaf education, and community slang, developed just as naturally as its spoken counterpart.
When the education system for Deaf people was first established in the US, educators traveled to Europe and asked for guidelines and support. France, which at the time already had an excellent educational system for deaf people, readily supplied the requested information.
In their book “A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language” (2015) Shaw and Delaporte highlight and break down the etymological evolution of ASL from a mix of French sign language, native american sign languages and other european sign languages into how it is used today.
For their piece “ABC – Always Be Communicating”, Kim and Mader will select one word for every letter of the alphabet from the Etymological Dictionary by Shaw and Delaporte and will turn them into abstract animations representing the etymological evolution of the language.
Christine Sun Kim, born 1980, lives and works in Berlin.
Thomas Mader, born 1984, lives and works in Berlin.
