My Language Is Not English: A Deaf Educator Answers JB Mitchell

I have taught American Sign Language at New York University since 1991. My credentials and history sit on the public record: first Deaf graduate of CUNY Lehman College in 1992, Master’s in Deafness Rehabilitation from NYU in 1997, SCPI rating of Superior Plus, Iowa School for the Deaf from first grade through twelfth, twenty-three years as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for Deaf services at the New York State Department of Education, and in Spring 2023 the first Deaf dual tutorial instructor at NYU Gallatin, where one of the two tutorials I taught was Black Sign Language. I write today because a man on TikTok who calls himself an ASL Communication Coach has been telling a generation of young people that my language is English. It is not. Marlee Matlin has said so publicly, clearly, and with the moral authority she has earned across forty years of Deaf advocacy. JB Mitchell has responded by calling Marlee an actor rather than an educator. That is the move of a man who has run out of argument.

Let me be plain. JB Mitchell is wrong. He is wrong on the linguistics, on the history, and on the damage he does to Deaf children, hearing children, and anyone who watches him. Marlee was correct to name it hate. I have watched the video in which he mocks her, and I watched him admit, in his own words, that he is advocating for communication as a business. That sentence closes the case on his motive. His product is heat. Heat sells. Truth does not generate the same engagement numbers.

I will explain what separates ASL from English, because the people who follow JB deserve to see the evidence rather than the catchphrase on his shirt. I will present it in the same sequence I teach my own students at NYU, which I have refined across thirty-five years of classroom work and across three textbooks that David Boles and I wrote together as the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series.

Phonology

Every natural language has a phonology. A phonology is a finite inventory of meaningless building blocks that combine to form meaningful units. English uses consonants and vowels. ASL uses handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual signals. When I teach ASL Level 1 at NYU, I show beginners the signs APPLE and CANDY and ask what makes the two signs different. The answer is handshape. Both signs are produced at exactly the same location, right outside the corner of the mouth, with a similar twisting motion. APPLE uses the X handshape, a bent index finger. CANDY uses the 1 handshape, a straight index finger. Nothing else separates them. An English speaker distinguishes “bat” from “pat” by voicing on the initial consonant, a phonological contrast that lives in a completely different articulatory system. The machinery is different at the atomic level, and that is where you see the two languages diverge.

Morphology

English marks tense with suffixes. Walk, walked, walking. ASL marks aspect through movement modulation. When I sign STUDY with a slow repeated arc, the meaning shifts to study over a long period. A tight quick repeated motion turns the same sign into study habitually. One sharp burst turns it into a single concentrated session of study. That is morphology carried in the movement itself, and English has no mechanism that operates this way. To translate one of those modulations, you need a full adverbial phrase in English. The two languages do not share a morphology. Every serious ASL textbook published in the last forty years documents the difference in detail, including our own.

Syntax

English runs subject-verb-object. ASL builds sentences around topic-comment structure. “COFFEE, I LIKE” follows ASL’s rules and places the topic first. My Level 2 students learn this principle in the second week. ASL also uses the signing space itself as grammar. I can establish a referent in a location to my left, and every verb I sign afterward agrees with that referent by moving toward or away from its location. English has no grammatical mechanism that uses physical space in this way. None. If ASL were English, this apparatus would not exist, and I would have nothing to teach past the vocabulary.

Non-manual markers

In ASL, raised eyebrows mark yes-and-no questions. Furrowed brows mark wh-questions. A head shake across a signed phrase negates it. Mouth morphemes modulate adverbial meaning. These are grammatical operators, performing the same function that tone performs in Mandarin or that auxiliary verbs perform in English. A hearing beginner sometimes reads the face as emotion. The face is a syntactic system worn on the face. English has nothing comparable. David Boles and I devoted the third volume of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, Beyond the Hands, to non-manual grammar alone. If ASL were English, we would not have had to write that book.

Classifier predicates

ASL uses classifier constructions to depict shape, size, location, handling, and motion. A vehicle climbing a winding road, a person threading through a crowd, a stack of papers tipping and spilling, each gets rendered through classifier predicates that draw the scene visually while obeying grammatical rules. David and I wrote Depicting Space as the second volume of the series precisely because classifier morphology is where English-speaking ASL learners most often collapse back into English word order and need to be pulled forward into the real grammar. English describes these events with verbs and prepositional phrases. ASL depicts them with spatially organized constructions built from handshape classes. Different machinery, different language.

The three signed systems and the category error

Once the linguistics is visible, the question is why anyone would claim ASL is English. The claim survives on a category error, and the error becomes obvious once the three signed systems in American use are named properly.

ASL is a natural language that emerged inside the American Deaf community. Its lineage traces to French Sign Language through Laurent Clerc, who came to the United States with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet in 1817. ASL is the native language of a large Deaf population, transmitted from parent to child and peer to peer in Deaf schools like the one I attended. Gallaudet University teaches it. The Americans with Disabilities Act recognizes it. NYU accepts it for foreign language credit, as do most North American universities.

Manually Coded English is a family of invented systems. Signed Exact English and Signing Exact English II are the two best known. Those systems were constructed in the 1970s precisely because ASL is not English. Educators wanted a way to present English word order and English morphemes on the hands so that Deaf children could see English grammar rendered visually. The existence of MCE proves the opposite of JB’s claim. Building an artificial sign system to represent English would be senseless if the natural sign language already were English. The engineering of MCE was a concession; nothing about its design exposed a hidden English nature inside ASL.

Pidgin Signed English, also called Contact Signing, is a contact variety. Ceil Lucas and Clayton Valli documented it in Language Contact in the American Deaf Community. When ASL users and English users interact, a contact variety emerges that borrows ASL signs and arranges them in looser English-influenced order. Contact signing is real, and contact signing is not ASL. The analogy to Spanglish is close. Spanglish arises at the border between Spanish and English, and nobody claims Spanglish proves Spanish to be a dialect of English. Claiming that Pidgin Signed English proves ASL to be English makes the same error and deserves the same dismissal.

The #pseteacher tag and JB Mitchell’s own record

Jullian “J.B.” Mitchell, according to his own GoFundMe campaign from September 2023, is a “Mainstream Deaf-Black male, 39 years old ASL educator.” The “Mainstream Deaf” self-identification matters, so let me explain what it means. In Deaf cultural terminology, a mainstream Deaf person was educated in hearing public schools rather than in a Deaf residential school like the Iowa School for the Deaf, which I attended from first grade through twelfth. Mainstreaming is a common placement in the United States, and it produces Deaf adults with a wide range of language acquisition histories. Some mainstream Deaf children receive strong ASL support through skilled interpreters and thrive. Others are raised with Signed Exact English, with contact signing, or with no signed language at all, and come to the Deaf community in college or adulthood feeling, in JB’s own words from another of his videos, “not deaf enough.”

Let me clarify what “not deaf enough” actually means in practice, because the phrase has done a lot of rhetorical work in JB’s videos. He uses it to frame Deaf community corrections of his signing as social rejection. The corrections are linguistic. A person can be Deaf and not know the grammar, conventions, syntax, and rules of ASL. Being Deaf grants you Deaf identity, Deaf community belonging, and the lived experience of Deafness. Being Deaf does not grant automatic mastery of ASL grammar, any more than growing up hearing and speaking English from birth grants mastery of English phonology, morphology, or syntax. Most hearing native English speakers could not explain the subjunctive mood, diagram a complex sentence, or describe the difference between a dental fricative and an alveolar fricative. Native-speaker status and linguistic expertise are two different skills. When a trained Deaf educator corrects another Deaf person’s ASL grammar, the feedback is linguistic. The correction rests on decades of formal study and has nothing to do with deciding who counts as Deaf enough. The remedy is study.

In a separate TikTok, JB describes his signing life as beginning at age twenty-four, when he started operating as a “middleman” interpreter between English and ASL. Age twenty-four is late by any linguistic acquisition standard. Children who grow up inside a full signed language environment from infancy have a native command of that language that late learners rarely match. The observation describes how language acquisition works and carries no moral judgment about late learners.

JB has no public credentials in ASL linguistics, ASL education, or interpreter certification. His TikTok bio describes him as “ASL Communication Coach” or “ASL Confidence Coach,” titles that appear nowhere in the registry of the Deaf education profession. The website aslkeepitsimple.com markets services to “non-native signers” looking to learn conversational ASL. Those titles are self-applied. The services sold are aimed at hearing beginners who are in no position to evaluate whether what he teaches is actual ASL.

Then there is the admission that closes the case. JB tags his own TikTok videos with the hashtag #pseteacher alongside #aslteacher and #aslisenglish, often in the same post. PSE is Pidgin Signed English, the contact variety that Lucas and Valli documented. JB knows what PSE is well enough to label himself a PSE teacher in his own metadata. Then he claims that PSE and ASL are the same language, and sells the claim to hearing beginners as a controversial truth. Mislabeling a product is the correct description of this activity. His own hashtags do the convicting.

None of this is a takedown of a late-acquired signer or a mainstream-educated Deaf man. I teach late-acquired signers every semester at NYU, and I watch them do beautiful work when they arrive ready to learn ASL as ASL. What cannot stand is a self-certified coach with no formal training publicly telling hearing beginners that a contact variety is the same as the natural language that raised me, while tagging his own videos #pseteacher in the same breath. That is the specific claim, from that specific speaker, using his own materials. The correction belongs on the record.

What is actually at stake

If this were a taxonomy dispute I would not be writing today. Consequences extend far beyond the classroom.

The Milan Congress of 1880 voted to ban signed languages from Deaf education across the Western world. For roughly a century, Deaf children were punished for signing in school and forced into lip reading and oralism, an ideology that held spoken language to be the only legitimate human language. I will not pretend to describe those hundred years in a paragraph. Generations of Deaf children grew up without full access to any language during the years when the human brain is hardwired to acquire one. The damage is real and measurable in the acquisition literature, and every Deaf educator carries that history forward. Recovery began when William Stokoe published Sign Language Structure in 1960 and forced the academic world to acknowledge ASL as a natural language on its own terms. That acknowledgment opened the door to Deaf education in ASL, to professional interpreter training, and to the Deaf cultural renaissance that produced Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, Nyle DiMarco, the National Theatre of the Deaf, and the world I teach in now.

The claim that ASL is English reruns the oralist argument in new clothes. If ASL is merely English on the hands, Deaf schools have no reason to teach ASL as a distinct language, interpreter certification loses its linguistic basis, ASL has no claim to foreign language credit at universities, early ASL exposure for Deaf infants becomes a waste of effort, and a hundred years of recovery unwinds across a few viral videos. The rhetorical move looks mild from a distance. From where I teach, where I place Deaf clients in jobs, and where I watch Deaf children work their way back from language deprivation, the move is a battering ram against our recovery.

What this looks like when it reaches Lincoln Center

Here is what “ASL is English” thinking does when it arrives at a great American cultural institution. In 2023, my husband David Boles and I approached the Metropolitan Opera about providing ASL-interpreted performances, following the model Broadway has used successfully since 1980 through the Theatre Development Fund’s Juilliard-based program, which I helped advise for years. The Met’s initial position rested on the assumption that English open captions already gave Deaf audiences sufficient access. The position looks generous on paper, and inside the Deaf community it reads as the old oralist assumption wearing a corporate suit.

Many Deaf Americans do not have strong English literacy. Foreign-born Deaf people arriving in the United States often learn ASL as their first fully accessible language because they were never given a usable written language at home. American-born Deaf adults, depending on educational path, carry a wide range of English reading abilities. English captions, in any of these cases, are a hearing person’s solution rendered onto a Deaf audience. The captions were designed for hearing patrons who want to follow an opera sung in Italian or German. Captions reach the Deaf audience only insofar as that audience happens to read English fluently, and many Deaf Americans do not.

David and I had to explain to the Met, patiently and repeatedly, that ASL is not English. Our letter put it directly: ASL grammar and syntax descend from French Sign Language through Laurent Clerc, and ASL does not equal English text. Captions built on English syntax sit one layer removed from any of the Romance-language operas being sung on the Met stage. Add ASL, a visual and spatial language with its own grammar, and the number of interpretive layers triples. Replacing a live ASL performer with written English text fails as an accessibility solution. The performance is the language.

The Met listened. On July 11, 2023, David and I met with their leadership at Lincoln Center and presented the case in person. I performed the Maria Callas aria O mio babbino caro in our High Art ASL style during the meeting, which I had practiced over a hundred times to render the vibrato, the intention, and the grief of the lyric in visual language. The Met asked questions that revealed exactly the “ASL is English” assumption. One question was why ASL interpreters would be needed if the operas were already open captioned in English. David later summed up our answer for OperaWire magazine in October 2023, saying that too often institutions assume English libretto captions are enough for the Deaf, and that assumption is simply wrong because ASL is not English and ASL has its roots in French. The meeting closed productively. Met leadership committed to closed captioning all their archival Met Opera On Demand recordings, and our ASL Opera Project website went live that September at ASL-Opera.com.

The broader damage belongs in this article because JB Mitchell’s campaign does not only harm Deaf children, Deaf adults, and Deaf language learners. His rhetoric reaches into cultural institutions and reinforces the exact assumption David and I had to dismantle in conference rooms at Lincoln Center. Every time a hearing administrator at a museum, an opera house, a symphony, a theater, or a public agency hears that “ASL is English,” the administrator concludes that English captions are sufficient accessibility. Deaf patrons are then excluded from the experiences the captions were supposed to make available. Hearing institutions that want to do the right thing land on the wrong solution because a confident Deaf-identified man on TikTok told them the wrong solution was correct. The damage runs in both directions. It lands on Deaf audiences who were already underserved, and it lands on hearing allies who believed they were meeting their obligations until a Deaf educator corrected them in person.

On the rhetorical moves and the business admission

A Deaf creator on DeafVIDEO.TV has already catalogued JB’s fallacies: False Premise, False Dichotomy, Circular Reasoning, Poisoning the Well, and Motte and Bailey. The Motte and Bailey move is the one to watch. JB defends the indefensible bailey (“ASL is English, period”) by retreating under pressure to something milder about historical contact between the two languages, then returns to the bailey once the pressure lifts. The maneuver works on viewers who do not recognize the pattern. Naming it strips the trick of its cover.

JB has tried to strip Marlee of her standing by calling her an actor rather than an ASL educator. Let me answer that directly. Marlee lost her hearing at eighteen months old, uses ASL, and has spent forty years making ASL visible in mainstream American culture. Her testimony before Congress produced the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, which gave Deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans access to closed captioning on every television set manufactured in this country. She refused to allow a hearing actor to play her Deaf husband in CODA, and the casting that resulted won Troy Kotsur the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The National Association of the Deaf has counted her as a member for decades. Reducing her to “an actor” is the kind of thing a man says when he cannot answer the substance, and when a Deaf woman with a platform tells him he is spreading hate.

JB also accuses the Deaf community of gatekeeping the language against him. Gatekeeping is a word that should be used carefully, and I will use it carefully here. When a Deaf child is told that a contact variety is the full language and grows up without access to grammatical ASL, the gatekeeper is the person who lied to her. When a Deaf college student sits in a Signed Exact English classroom instead of an ASL classroom because her family bought the “ASL is English” message, the gatekeeper is the person who sold it. The actual gatekeepers of ASL across the last sixty-five years have been hearing educators who refused to let Deaf children sign, oralists who banned the language outright, school boards that cut ASL programs, and social media hustlers who muddy the water for profit. The Deaf linguistic community of Deaf teachers, Deaf scholars, and Deaf advocates is the opposite of a gatekeeper. We are the people who kept the gate open through a hundred years of attempts to close it.

And then there is the admission. In his own response video to Marlee, JB says he is advocating for communication as a business. His TikTok profile links to a merchandise store and a GoFundMe. The business model and the thesis sit in the same frame. Controversy generates duets, stitches, reposts, and revenue. Saying something that upsets the Deaf majority is the engine of the channel. If he were right about the linguistics, the heat would not exist, and the channel would have to find another engine.

A note about race

I am a white woman from Iowa. I taught the Black Sign Language Tutorial at NYU Gallatin in Spring 2023 because a hearing Black student of mine, who was enrolled at Gallatin, invited me to teach it. NYU Gallatin runs on an unusual academic model. Students design their own courses of study and then seek out qualified instructors to teach the subjects they want to learn. The student who came to me had taken my ASL classes at NYU and knew my research record on ASL variation and Deaf cultural studies firsthand. She asked me to teach the Black Sign Language course. The Gallatin program approved me. Several of the students who enrolled were Black. I accepted because the qualification to teach a linguistic variety rests on the teacher’s research and pedagogical training rather than on the teacher’s birth identity, and because the invitation came from a Black student who had studied ASL with me directly and knew my work.

You do not have to be born in France to teach French. You do have to know French, to have studied its grammar, to understand its literature, and to have been trained in pedagogy. Hearing people teach ASL at universities across this country every day, and they do so legitimately when they have done the kind of training any language requires. My qualifications for the Black Sign Language tutorial were decades of work on ASL variation, my SCPI Superior Plus certification, my NYU teaching record, my collaboration with Black Deaf colleagues who teach the variety themselves, and the trust of the Black student who invited me to teach the course in the first place. None of my qualifications came from my skin color.

I spell this out for two reasons. First, I know the objection some readers will reach for when they see a white educator criticizing a Black creator. The critique of JB Mitchell is a linguistic critique. His race is not the subject here. Second, the principle that brought me into the Gallatin tutorial is the principle JB violates. Teaching a language requires training, not just membership in the community that speaks it. A hearing person can teach ASL if she has done the work. No native French speaker can teach French without studying it. The same rule governs a Deaf person and ASL grammar. JB is Deaf, and nothing in this piece contests that. He has positioned himself as an ASL teacher, however, without the formal training any language requires of those who teach it.

Black ASL itself is a real linguistic variety, documented by Carolyn McCaskill, Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, and Joseph Hill in The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL, published by Gallaudet University Press in 2011. The variety developed during segregation, when Black Deaf children were educated separately from white Deaf children, and it carries genuine grammatical, lexical, and prosodic features that distinguish it from mainstream ASL. Black ASL is ASL. It is a sociolinguistic variety of the same natural language, and it has nothing to do with JB’s claim that ASL is English. Deaf critics of JB include Black scholars and Black creators pushing back alongside everyone else. Marlee identified the campaign as hate. @aslsuzyq stitched a response. The DeafVIDEO.TV creator catalogued the fallacies. The community chorus is broad, diverse, and clear.

The close

I have taught ASL at NYU since 1991. For twenty-three years I have placed Deaf clients in jobs at the New York State Department of Education. With David Boles, I have written the three volumes of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series currently in use as reference texts, along with earlier works including Hardcore ASL and Hand Jive from Barnes & Noble and Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language from Cengage. Across thirty-five years of that work, I have sat across from Deaf children whose parents signed to them in Pidgin English for fifteen years and who arrived at my office unable to discuss their own futures in full sentences. That is the bill that gets paid when the public story about ASL goes wrong.

JB Mitchell is collecting likes from viewers who will walk away believing a language is a dialect. The Deaf children who inherit that misunderstanding will be the ones who pay for it. Marlee called the campaign hate because hate is what it is, a deliberate muddying of the language that raised me, taught me, and gave me the career I have. I have no interest in punishing JB. I have an interest in telling the truth plainly, on the record, with my name on it, so that the next Deaf child who comes across his content finds a correction already waiting.

ASL is not English. The claim has never been true, and no amount of social media confidence will make it so. My life’s work sits on that fact, along with the future of every Deaf child who deserves to grow up inside a real language rather than a hustle.