Black American Sign Language

fWotD Episode 3205: Black American Sign Language Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.The featured article for Thursday, 12 February 2026, is Black American Sign Language.Black American Sign Language (BASL) or Black Sign Variation (BSV) is a dialect of American Sign Language (ASL) used most commonly by deaf Black Americans in the United States. The divergence from ASL was influenced largely by the segregation of schools in the American South. Like other schools at the time, schools for the deaf were segregated based upon race, creating two language communities among deaf signers: Black deaf signers at Black schools and White deaf signers at White schools. As of the mid 2010s, BASL is still used by signers in the South despite public schools having been legally desegregated since 1954.Linguistically, BASL differs from other varieties of ASL in its phonology, syntax, and vocabulary. BASL tends to have a larger signing space, meaning that some signs are produced further away from the body than in other dialects. 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.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:08 UTC on Thursday, 12 February 2026.For the full current version of the article, see Black American Sign Language on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Bluesky at @wikioftheday.com.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm standard Aditi.