Photos by Michael D. Spencer

Cover Story

A Race to Study—and Preserve—Black American Sign Language

Franklin Jones, Jr., is interested in the history, linguistics, and significance of BASL. He’s on a mission to expand the language’s research before its native signers are gone.

Franklin Jones, Jr., is in a race against time. 

Jones, a lecturer in Deaf studies at BU Wheelock, researches Black American Sign Language (BASL). He’s interested in its historical roots, linguistic intricacies, and cultural significance. But with each year that goes by since Black and white schools integrated, there are fewer and fewer people who know BASL, let alone use it to converse. 

“It’s really critical to interview and take the opportunity to look at the experiences and history of the Black folks that are left, because many of them are dying,” Jones says. “So can we pull together those last bits of information that are still in our history from these senior members of our community, and ask about different sign production and what that looks like, before it’s too late?” 

It’s a subject that hits close to home for Jones. He’s “fourth-generation Deaf,” he says, from South Carolina. He attended the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, in unincorporated Spartanburg County, a school that was segregated from its founding in 1849 until it integrated in 1967. There’s no record of what BASL looked like when the school was segregated, Jones says; there was just no focus on the language. 

At home, he uses a combination of BASL, standard ASL, and home sign—language that’s unique from family to family. “Growing up, I realized that I had no idea of what Black ASL was versus standard American Sign Language,” he says. “I didn’t know that there was a difference. Even when I would notice [people using different signs], I didn’t have a label or language to talk about it.”

It wasn’t until college, when Jones was studying with Carolyn McCaskill at Gallaudet University, that he understood BASL to be its own language, separate from standard ASL. 

Jones counts McCaskill among his earliest mentors—she was also his first Black deaf teacher, at any grade. Jones says he can easily recall being criticized by white teachers and peers for his BASL and learning to code-switch when he’s in mostly white spaces. It was McCaskill who initially gave him an understanding of the linguistic gymnastics he was forced to do, and who encouraged him to dig into BASL in the long run.

What is BASL?

What Jones learned was this: during the century of school segregation, an entire language flourished—something that Black deaf people have always known and a fact that the research is only now catching up with. Black deaf people who attended Jones’ South Carolina school—and others like it throughout the country, particularly residential schools—developed their own style of sign, distinct and separate from standard (white) ASL, Jones says. Black people make up about 8 percent of the 11 million deaf or hard of hearing people in America. And McCaskill, who founded the Center for Black Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, estimates that roughly half of deaf Black people use BASL, as reported in the New York Times. 

Compared to those who use standard ASL, BASL signers are sometimes seen as less animated, Jones says. There are fewer mouth movements (a feature known as facial grammar) in BASL, for example. In other ways, though, it’s perhaps more expressive. The sign space for BASL users tends to be higher, closer to the forehead, and generally wider overall, whereas standard ASL tends to be farther down and to rely on tighter, more economical choices. People fluent in BASL also tend to use both hands for signs that might require only one in standard ASL. Still, BASL is not a monolith. As with any language, there are noticeable dialects and regional accents. 

Jones draws some parallels between BASL and African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, which has its own unique grammatical, vocabulary, and accent features compared to standard American English. But AAVE isn’t an exact proxy for BASL, because it’s also possible to use a version of ASL that includes AAVE phrases and idioms. 

Jones says he recognizes AAVE expressions that show up in ASL but were never part of the original BASL vernacular, an indication that the person using the sign lives with a Black hearing person or perhaps went to a mainstream school. 

“Very often, we have these conversations where people say, ‘Black ASL and AAVE are the same.’ But in actuality, they are two separate things, and we need to think about them in two separate silos,” Jones says. “We don’t want to automatically pigeonhole Black ASL to be the same as AAVE, because it’s not.”

What is clear is that AAVE is not just broken English, nor is BASL broken ASL. These are distinct, cohesive vernaculars in their own right. He’s interested in engaging in research that explores the differences and similarities between AAVE and BASL. 

But Jones is also eager to see more rigorous research into the specific characteristics of BASL. Because there’s so much grammatical overlap between BASL and ASL, he wonders whether it can be linguistically categorized as its own language, or whether it’s akin to a distinct dialect of ASL. 

“If we think of ASL as an umbrella, then underneath it we can have Black ASL, Martha’s Vineyard ASL, Indigenous [sign language],” Jones says. “Are those all separate languages? That gives me pause. We just need so much more research in this field to fully understand it.” 

A 2011 book by McCaskill and her colleagues represents a big step forward in that research. The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure (Gallaudet University Press) presents the first empirical study that verifies BASL as a distinct variety of ASL. 

“It felt like home for me”

It’s an increasingly rare occasion when Jones runs into other folks who use BASL. But when he does, their conversations contain a richness that’s hard to find anywhere else, he says. He remembers attending a conference hosted by the National Black Deaf Advocates, an advocacy group for Black deaf and hard of hearing people in the US. 

“I was awestruck,” he says. “I had such a great experience. I saw so many Black deaf, deaf-blind, and deaf-disabled people—women, men, trans folks, nonbinary folks—everyone signing, and it felt like home for me. It felt like these were my people, and I had an instant connection with them. We were able to really talk through different topics, whatever we wanted to. I’m not sure that I have that experience often at all.”