Black American Sign Language (BASL) is a dialect of American Sign Language (ASL), usually encountered among deaf African Americans. The divergence from ASL was influenced largely by segregation in the American South. Like other schools at the time, schools for the deaf were segregated by race, creating two language communities: White deaf signers at White schools and Black deaf signers at Black schools. Today, BASL is still used by signers in the South despite the gradual desegregation of deaf schools after 1954, the year of the US Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. Linguistically, BASL differs from other varieties of ASL in its phonology, syntax, and lexicon. In ASL, signs are generally produced near the body, but BASL tends to have a larger signing space. Signers of BASL also tend to prefer two-handed variants of signs while signers of ASL tend to prefer one-handed variants. Some signs are different in BASL as well, with some borrowings from African American English.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_American_Sign_Language

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1210:

Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor was excommunicated by Pope Innocent III after he commanded the Pope to annul the Concordat of Worms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_IV,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

1878:

Soprano Marie Selika Williams became the first African-American artist to perform at the White House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Selika_Williams

1928:

Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie, the first completely post- produced synchronized sound animated cartoon, was released. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie

1956:

In the Polish embassy in Moscow Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said "We will bury you" while addressing Western envoys, prompting them to leave the room. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you

1991:

Croatian War of Independence: The Yugoslav People's Army captured the Croatian city of Vukovar, ending an 87-day siege. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vukovar

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

kooky: 1. Eccentric, strange, or foolish; crazy or insane; kookish. 2. (surfing) Behaving like a kook (a person with poor style or skill); kook-like. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kooky

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.   --Margaret Atwood https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood