Feelings and Mouthing Movements in ASL

This week, I continued using ASL Deafined, specifically spending most of my time learning about how to sign certain feelings (tired, cold, hungry, etc). Of course, expressing feelings is crucial across languages, and is often one of the first things children learn how to do, but it’s really interesting to see these emotions conveyed through a visual language. Learning how to sign these feelings really reinforced what I already knew, but wasn’t careful about doing, in signing – that you NEED to use different facial expressions! To put this into a more understandable context, if one were to sign with a blank face, that’s just about equivalent to mumbling in spoken language.

Although I knew of the importance of facial expressions, one thing that actually was new for me was learning and seeing how mouthing words can be used. This was really surprising for me as ASL isn’t actually a spoken language, so why would mouthing be used so frequently? What I learned when I looked into this further is that mouthing is REALLY important for interpreters, and slightly less important but still used among others within the deaf community. The most interesting thing I came across during this research was that mouthing can actually create a new meaning, not just add to a preexisting sign. Like with the sign “not yet”, where the mouth gesture is actually part of the sign itself. Check it out:

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