American Sign Language materials

ASCII-Stokoe notation for American Sign Language

[NEW] While writing my dissertation at UC Berkeley, in the late 70s and early 80s, I used Stokoe, Casterline, & Croneberg's Dictionary of American Sign Language as a data base, and I developed a way to transcribe its notation system ("Stokoe notation") into ASCII. I've written that system up and here it is. Although several people have sent me cogent and valuable comments on it, I have for some reason never gotten around to editing them in; but, from the interest that has been expressed in it, I think that there's more value to the sign language research community in having it available, even poorly described, than in waiting for me to make improvements or corrections that may never come.

For clarity, this text should be printed in a monospace serif font, such as Courier or Courier New: monospace so the columns and tables will come out right, and serif so you can tell small ell from capital eye from digit one.

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Click here for pure text version

Some ASL (American Sign Language) links


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last modified 98225