Stokoe, William C., Jr.

▪ 2001

      American Sign Language (ASL) advocate (b. July 21, 1919, Lancaster, N.H.—d. April 4, 2000, Chevy Chase, Md.), was a leading educator of the deaf and was instrumental in gaining acceptance of ASL as a genuine language. In 1946 Stokoe earned a Ph.D. in English from Wells College, Aurora, N.Y., where he taught for the next seven years. From 1955 to 1970 he served as a professor and chairman of the English department at Gallaudet University, a school for hearing-impaired students in Washington, D.C. At Gallaudet, Stokoe first encountered people using sign language, and eventually he set out to prove that ASL was a true language with its own syntax, rules, and grammatical structures. He produced two influential books, Sign Language Structure (1960) and A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles (1965), that demonstrated that ASL met the criteria of a fully developed language.

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