American Sign Language is not a signed version of English — it has its own independent grammar.

American Sign Language, or ASL, is a complete natural language with its own grammar, syntax, and word order, distinct from spoken or written English. A sentence signed in ASL is not simply English translated word for word into hand shapes; the grammar frequently rearranges concepts, uses space and facial expression grammatically, and has no direct sign for many English function words like “the” or “is.”

Historically, ASL developed largely from Old French Sign Language, brought to the United States in the early 19th century by Laurent Clerc, a deaf French educator who co-founded the first American school for the deaf. Because of that lineage, ASL actually shares more grammatical structure with French Sign Language than with English, and different countries that speak the same spoken language, such as the US and UK, use entirely different, mutually unintelligible sign languages.