Background
My name is Ryan Lepic. I am a professor in Linguistics at Gallaudet University. Before coming to Gallaudet, I taught as an adjunct in Linguistics at UC San Diego. During that time, I taught three quarters of LIGN 101 "Introduction to the Study of Language".
The book that I used for LIGN 101 was the 2014 edition of Genetti's edited textbook, How Languages Work. This textbook is great for two reasons: 1) it has a functionalist framing, and 2) it contains "language profiles" that expose students to a number of languages besides English.
Language Profiles -- How Languages Work (Genetti 2014, 2018)
In my LIGN 101 course, I selected a few Language Profiles for students to focus on. These were Finnish, South Concuhcos Quechua, Bardi, Seneca, and Akkadian. The second edition has a total of 14 language profiles. These are concise introductions to language communities and structures. They range from around 2,500-4,000 words and are written by professional linguists who have worked with these languages.
However, there was not (and still is not) a sign language represented among the language profiles. I think the reasons for this are practical (how does one pick only 14 among the 7,000 languages of the world? and what does one do about the heavy influence of generative linguistics and the many typologically idiosyncratic terms in sign linguistics?).
But I know some things about ASL, and my students at UC San Diego were interested to learn more about it. For this reason, I went ahead and wrote a language profile for American Sign Language myself in 2016, trying to emulate the style of the great Language Profiles found in the How Languages Work textbook. That "textbook" style is also why you don't see many references in the text.
Making this webpage
Before making this webpage, I had a PDF copy of my ASL language profile that I circulated among my students and also shared with a few colleagues. I didn't even think to put my name or any other contact information on it!
Some of my colleagues have urged me to try to publish it, but in a decade I have never gotten around to it, so it seems unlikely to happen. Plus, as I write this in 2025, the academic publishing space has been pulled between some publishers becoming more corporate and hard to access, and many academics seeking to make their materials more widely available. So, a website seems like a better bet for sharing this as a resource.
Finally, as you can see from the profile itself, I analyze an ASL video that I found online. I never contacted the original author of the video for their permission or to let them know I was using their video. At the time when I was teaching a class, it felt like less of an issue. Trying to publish so much of their work in an otherwise short resource like this feels uncomfortable, but linking back to another person's webpage is much more comfortable.