Deaf Researcher Helped Codify American Sign Language

Though ‘differently abled’ as a teenager, she was determined to graduate from college and find a career which would support herself financially and be helpful to others. By that measure of success, she succeeded. 

FAMILY

Dorothy Casterline (DC) was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father was a stonemason and ironworker. Her mother was a housemaid. 

CHILDHOOD

DC lost her hearing in seventh grade, though she never knew why. 

EDUCATION

While completing high school in the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind, DC successfully lobbied the Honolulu police to cease barring deaf residents from driving cars. 

She spent three years after high school working to save money to attend Gallaudet University in the United States, the only U.S. university-level school designed for the deaf or hard of hearing.  After enrolling, DC completed her required courses in three years, graduating with honors. 

RESEARCHER ASSISTING WRITERS

As an undergraduate university student, DC caught the attention of a professor who, in addition to teaching literature, was investigating the grammar and syntax of sign language, which at the time was considered nothing more than a gestural derivative of spoken English. But the professor believed there was much more to it. His goal, which he realized with DC and another professor as co-authors, was to compile the first systematic dictionary of what they came to call ‘American Sign Language.’

The book was one professor’s idea, but DC did most of the work. The lead professor had a vision for the project but he also had two problems: he was not deaf and he had never studied sign language before arriving to teach at Gallaudet. DC was one of his star students, who “wrote essays better than nine-tenths of the hearing students whose papers I had read for a dozen years elsewhere,” said the lead professor. 

CHALLENGE – FEELING LIKE AN OUTSIDER

DC was literally an outsider, even among the deaf students at Gallaudet. Having been born in Hawaii to Japanese American parents, she was among the first students of color at the school – and eventually, most likely the first person of color to join the faculty. 

Due to her dedication to learning and her ability to write the English language and communicate in sign language, upon graduation, DC was asked to join the faculty of Gallaudet’s English department, working as an instructor and research with the lead professor’s Linguistics Research Laboratory. 

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, the two professors and DC filmed thousands of hours of interviews with people from all walks of life: children and college students, men and women, Northerners and Southerners. It was the task of DC, who had fine, precise handwriting, to transcribe the interviews and then use a specialized typewriter to compile and annotate them. She worked late into the night and on weekends, often leaving her husband home to return to her school office to work with her newborn son in one arm. 

The result was a vast collection of signs, which, they argued in “A Dictionary of American Sign Language On Linguistic Principles”, constituted not a variant of English but a language unto itself, with its own rules. The dictionary organized its entries by hand formations, not by alphabetical order of their English equivalents. 

CHALLENGE – TRADITION

The dictionary was not immediately welcome, either in the Deaf community or among linguists generally. The idea that sign language was merely a visual, gestural adjunct to spoken language, was too ingrained among language study professionals. 

As DC later explained, “We’ve always had – and continue to still have – pictures to illustrate how a sign is made so we’re conditioned to think of American Sign Language as a picture language. Seeing these strange symbols for the first time can be daunting.”

By the 1980s, the dictionary had become a cornerstone of a robust, emerging cultural identity among the differently abled Deaf populations of America and many foreign countries.  

CAREER SATISFACTION

DC said that she helped write the dictionary “to show that deaf people can be studied as linguistic and cultural communities, and not only as unfortunate victims with similar physical and sensory pathologies.”

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This career story is based on an obituary written by Clay Risen, published within The New York Times in August, 2023.