Deaf culture Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication. When used as ...

and

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with #Non-manual elements, no ...

, a sign name (or a name sign) is a special sign that is used to uniquely identify a person (a

name A name is a term used for identification by an external observer. They can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. The entity identified by a name is called its referent. A person ...

American Sign Language

In the American deaf community and

American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that i ...

(ASL), there are cultural norms regarding ASL name signs; for example, they must be agreed upon by the named person and the broader

deaf community Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...

. This ensures that no one else in the community already has the same sign name or that the same sign has a different meaning. Until a person receives a sign name, the person's name is usually fingerspelled, rendering a letter-by-letter representation of a person's English-language name.Ilaria Parogni
What Matters in a Name Sign?
, ''New York Times'' (July 16, 2021). Linguist

Samuel James Supalla Samuel James Supalla (December 4, 1957) is an American Sign Language performer, filmmaker, and linguist. Supalla was born in Pasco, Washington in December 1957. On his birth, he has said: "Although, I really think of myself as being born around ...

identifies name signs as having dual functions: to identify persons and to signify "membership in the Deaf community." Different deaf cultures have different customs around sign names. For example, in the deaf American community, sign names are usually subdivided into two naming systems: descriptive (DNS) and arbitrary (ANS). Descriptive names manually illustrate descriptions of the person (for example, personality or physical appearance) and are conveyed through classifier handshapes, and an arbitrary name sign corresponds to initials (or to the first letter of a spoken name) applied to one or more locations. A third category, nontraditional name signs, combine elements of the arbitrary and descriptive. An ANS sign is usually just a unique sign without other meaning, but there may be family patterns, like all the children in a family having names signed at the chin. Name signs may change over the course of a user's life. While name signs were originally exclusive to deaf people, some hearing people who use ASL and interact with the deaf community also have name signs. Prominent individuals with no direct connection to deaf culture are sometimes also assigned name signs; for example,

George Washington George Washington (, 1799) was a Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father and the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. As commander of the Continental Army, Washington led Patriot (American Revoluti ...

Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War ...

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

, and

Vincent van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2,100 artworks ...

all have name signs. Contemporary non-deaf figures, such as elected officials, are sometimes also given name signs. For example, after becoming Vice President-elect of the United States,

Kamala Harris Kamala Devi Harris ( ; born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who served as the 49th vice president of the United States from 2021 to 2025 under President Joe Biden. She is the first female, first African American, and ...

was assigned a name sign consisting of a rotation of the wrist completed concurrently with the unfurling of the thumb, index and middle finger; the sign was partly derived from the sign for

lotus flower ''Nelumbo nucifera'', also known as the pink lotus, sacred lotus, Indian lotus, or simply lotus, is one of two extant taxon, extant species of aquatic plant in the Family (biology), family Nelumbonaceae. It is sometimes colloquially called a ...

(which is what "Kamala" means in

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

) and from the number three (representing Harris as the first vice president to be a woman, African American, and Asian American).

American Sign Language

References

Further reading