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Introduction: Academic Acceptance of American Sign Language

'The movement to accept ASL throughout America is like a slow-building ground swell of water," according to Gary W. Olsen, Executive Director of the National Association of the Deaf. 1 "It gains momentum as it swells and so is the acceptance of ASL." Undoubtedly true, but the ground swell has been slow to emerge in academia. Although ASL has a long and rich history in America and scholarly research on ASL is in its third decade, ASL has been slow to garner any degree of status in the academic community. As recently as 1980, for example, Battison and Carter (1981:viii) conceded that "as far as we know, no colleges or university has yet made Sign Language a permanent part of its foreign language curricula, on a par with the other foreign languages they teach."