Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page would throw in some colloquial expressions from "real sign language" That was our term for the signed language used by most adult deaf people when communicating among themselves. I did a monologue . . . in which I used "real sign language" and it caused some consternation among a couple of the members of the company. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind was a growing awareness that Bill was right, and that what we were calling "real sign language" was in fact
ASL. After the publication of the dictionary Gil Eastman began to teach a course on American Sign Language and, at the same time,
started translating English drama into ASL. In 1973 he wrote Sign Me Alice based on Shaw's Pygmalion. Referring to Stokoe's research, Eastman says, "Dr. Stokoe taught me to be aware of sign language and to appreciate its beauty. I developed sign language courses, wrote plays, and went allover the country to conduct workshops . . . and to give speeches about my work. But it was Bill Stokoe who helped me to develop pride in my language and my activities, and it was he who encouraged me to tell the truth."38
In 1977 anew course entitled "Structure of American Sign Language" was offered at Gallaudet for undergraduates and at the graduate level for faculty and staff. This was more than ten years after the publication of the dictionary. Although the impact of
Bill's research was slow incoming, it was irreversible. "Prior to the publication of Bill's work" Fant recalls, "no one gave serious thought to a career as a sign language instructor. One could not even imagine conducting sober research on sign language."39
While in the beginning only a few people appreciated the dictionary's significance as the first linguistic analysis of sign language
(one of Stokoe's most ardent supporters believed at the time that the dictionary was "the work of a madman, even fewer recognized the importance of the essays in the appendix, particularly Croneberg's "Linguistic Community" and "Sign Language
Dialects." The first is an ethnographic and sociological portrait of the deaf community for "the reader whose knowledge of the deaf is limited to having seen members of a group

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