The Name You Cannot Give Yourself

Every semester it happens by the second week. A student in ASL 1, bright and eager and already half in love with the language, waits until the room empties and asks me for a sign name. The asking is shy and confident at the same time, the way people ask for something they assume is a formality, a small ceremony the teacher performs on request, like handing back a quiz. I tell them no. Then I tell them why, and the why takes the rest of the semester, and if I teach it well, it takes the rest of their lives. I want to set the why down in one place, because the question deserves a fuller answer than a hallway can hold, and because the answer opens a door into how Deaf culture actually works, which is what my students came to learn whether they know it yet or not. Two notes on words before we start. Students usually say sign name; the scholarship says name sign; I answer to both terms and grant neither on request. And when I write Deaf with a capital D, I mean the culture: the language, the schools, the clubs, the families, the jokes, the weddings, the funerals, the whole inherited world of people who live in American Sign Language. Small-d deaf is an audiogram. Capital-D Deaf is a people. The name sign belongs to the people.

A name sign is a personal name in American Sign Language: one sign, made once, that means one human being. It has no letters to say aloud and no translation into English, because names never translate; I would still be Janna in Paris, and my name sign would still be my name sign in a room where no English exists at all. Hearing students often imagine ASL as English rebuilt for the hands, so they assume their name must convert the way “hello” converts. It does no such thing. The closest most name signs come to English is a borrowed initial, one handshape lifted from the fingerspelled alphabet, and everything after that borrowing belongs to ASL alone.

The first surprise for hearing learners: we almost never use a name sign to call anybody. To get a Deaf person’s attention you wave in her sightline, tap her shoulder, thump the table so the wood carries, flick the lights. Name signs do their work in the third person. They are how the community talks about you when you are somewhere else, which means a name sign is, before anything else, proof that a community talks about you at all. When Deaf people meet, we fingerspell. The fingerspelled name comes first, and it never goes away; my students learn J-A-N-N-A before they learn one other fact about me. The second fact follows in the same minute, because I have a name sign and I show it, first morning, first introduction. My students use it from that hour on, and they should; using the names our community has already given is a working part of the culture they came to study, and nobody needs to earn the right to use my name. What waits is a name of one’s own. That arrives later, if it arrives at all, because spelling a name a hundred times a week is labor, and a community economizes on the names of the people it keeps in its hands.

A name sign also outlives its bearer. At Deaf gatherings the dead stay inside the conversation because their names stay in our hands; a woman gone twenty years surfaces in a story, her sign made the way she used to make it, and the whole table nods because the whole table remembers. The week-two request reaches, without knowing it, toward a seat in that memory, and seats in that memory are earned.

In 1992 a Deaf linguist named Samuel J. Supalla, born into a Deaf family, published The Book of Name Signs through DawnSignPress and gave scholarship its first careful map of how this naming system runs. Supalla found two systems living side by side. Descriptive name signs grow out of the body and habits of the person named: the scar through an eyebrow, the cowlick, the crooked grin, the way one boy chewed his pencil in 1961. Children coin most of them, chiefly at the Deaf residential schools where generations of us grew up together, and they carry the affection and the cruelty of the dormitory in equal measure. The boy grows up, the pencil is fifty years gone, and the name stays; in the end the name is the last witness left who remembers the pencil.

The residential schools that minted so many of those childhood names are mostly gone now, closed or shrunken by mainstreaming, and the coining has moved with the people, into Deaf clubs, Deaf churches, Deaf families, adult friendships, the long tables at a silent dinner. Fewer children grow up in dormitories full of signing peers, so more people meet the custom as adults, and a custom met in adulthood needs its rules stated out loud. That is part of why I am writing this down. The grandmother in the dormitory absorbed the law of naming by living inside it. My students have to be told.

Arbitrary name signs are the older and stranger system, and to my eye the more beautiful one. An arbitrary name sign means nothing. It takes a handshape from the manual alphabet, usually the first letter of the English name, and sets it at one location drawn from a small closed inventory, with one movement drawn from another small closed inventory. The locations are governed. The movements are governed. Supalla documented those constraints the way a phonologist documents the sound system of a spoken language, because that is what he was looking at: a grammar of naming, handed down through Deaf families for generations, in which the sign tells you nothing about the bearer’s face or habits and everything about where the bearer belongs. Meaninglessness is the design. A descriptive name says what you look like. An arbitrary name says whose you are.

Custom varies, as living custom does. Some regions and families favor blended forms that join an initial to a trait, and purists argue over those hybrids the way purists argue everywhere. Kathryn Meadow was studying name signs back in 1977, in the journal Sign Language Studies, and the phrase she set in her title was “identity symbols,” which names the load these signs carry. Across every variation I have met in my life, one rule holds steady from Maine to San Diego: somebody else gives you the name.

So who holds the authority? Deaf people hold it. Traditionally the name comes from a Deaf family, from Deaf schoolmates, or from the adult Deaf community once it knows you, and “once it knows you” is the working part of that sentence. You have to exist among us before we can name you. A name sign records a relationship, and a relationship requires two parties, which is why giving yourself one fails on logic before it ever reaches manners. A self-given name sign records a relationship with yourself. You already had one of those.

Hearing readers understand this in their bones, whatever they assume about ASL. Announce your own nickname at the office on Monday and watch it die by Friday. Everyone recognizes a self-conferred nickname as counterfeit; the entire value of “Ace” depends on other people minting it. Deaf culture takes that instinct, the one every human being shares, and gives it the force of law, because our stakes run higher than embarrassment.

Past that single instinct, English naming is open range with no sheriff on it. Parents name daughters after luxury sedans. Corporations pay agencies to assemble drug names from focus-grouped syllables. A man can name his boat, his band, his sourdough starter, and his fantasy football team before lunch, and no authority on earth reviews the paperwork. ASL runs its naming on different rules. The system has gatekeepers, the gatekeepers are alive, and they answer to a history that taught them what happens when other people decide things for the Deaf.

What happens, then, when a hearing student invents her own name sign in week three, or when a hearing teacher stands at the front of the room on day one and distributes name signs to twenty-five beginners like stickers on a folder? Something small and real gets taken. The invented sign counterfeits a relationship with a community the student has never entered. The classroom handout goes further; it teaches twenty-five future interpreters, teachers, nurses, and parents of Deaf babies that Deaf customs are decorations, detachable from the people who own them, available to anyone who wants the costume for an afternoon. Nobody in that room meant harm. The student meant enthusiasm, the teacher meant welcome, and I believe both, and the harm stands anyway, because the history of my culture is, to a painful degree, a history of hearing kindness that never asked first.

The invention has scaled, too. Open any video platform and you can watch hearing creators announce the name signs they chose for themselves, and watch teachers of varying fluency bestow name signs on strangers in the comments as a bit of audience candy. Each clip looks harmless on its own. Together they train millions of viewers to believe the naming is self-serve, and they bury the actual custom under a landslide of confident error, so that when a Deaf person objects, she reads as the unreasonable one, gatekeeping a thing the internet has already decided is free. Gatekeeping is the accusation. Gatekeeping is also, in the plain sense, the job: keeping a gate is what you do when something behind it is worth guarding.

In 1880, at the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan, hearing educators voted to push signed languages out of deaf schooling across most of the Western world, and they did it in the sincere belief that they were rescuing deaf children for speech. The delegates applauded themselves. Alexander Graham Bell, the most celebrated hearing friend the deaf world ever had, spent the decades after Milan warning against sign in the schools and against Deaf marrying Deaf, certain all the way to the end that he was helping. The century that followed gave us classrooms where Deaf children were punished for signing, where hands were slapped and sometimes tied, and where the language survived in dormitories after lights-out because children refused to let it die. The profession took one hundred thirty years to say the vote was wrong; the formal repudiation of Milan came at the Vancouver congress in 2010, an apology addressed to generations who could no longer attend.

Milan is the lesson I most want my students to carry out of my classroom. The danger to Deaf culture tends to arrive smiling, eager to help, determined that everyone feel included and comfortable, and willing to spend the integrity of my language to purchase that comfort without once feeling like a thief. My culture lives at daily risk of being overrun by good intentions. A teacher who hands out name signs so her hearing beginners will feel warmly welcomed is running the Milan principle in miniature: the comfort of the hearing gets priced above the grammar of the Deaf. She would be horrified to hear it put that way. Milan would have been horrified too.

Here is my policy, stated plainly, so no student of mine ever has to wonder. I teach American Sign Language, levels one through five. Enrolling in my course earns you my full effort, my patience, my honesty, and a fair grade. Enrolling earns you no name sign. Finishing ASL 5 with the highest mark I can give earns you no name sign either, because a transcript measures your relationship with a curriculum, and a name sign records your relationship with a people. The people meet elsewhere: at the Deaf club, the coffee social, the theater night, the town hall, the protest, the graveside. When a student of mine grows fluent enough to hold a real conversation without leaning on me, and keeps showing up in Deaf spaces until Deaf people know her face, ask after her when she misses a month, and count her as part of the room, then I will consider a name sign. Consider. Fluency I can measure across a desk; involvement I can only witness, and witnessing takes the one currency nobody can counterfeit, which is time. Sometimes the giving rightly belongs to a Deaf friend who knows her better than I do, and my job in that moment is to protect the custom, welcome the name, and stay out of the way.

I know teachers, even Deaf ASL teachers, who hand out name signs to any student who asks, and to hearing acquaintances who simply fancy owning one, because it makes those people feel good, and every time I learn of it the disappointment stays with me for days. That disappointment runs past feeling and into consequence. A culture survives on its load-bearing customs, and naming is load-bearing. Hand the naming out as a party favor and you have quietly trained a generation of interpreters, teachers, and hearing parents of Deaf children to believe that Deaf customs bend wherever a hearing feeling presses on them. Those students will remember the lesson at heavier moments than this one, in IEP meetings and hospital rooms and courtrooms, in every room where a hearing professional decides how much weight Deaf judgment deserves.

Someone always tells me it is only a name, and to lighten up. Nothing has ever been only a name anywhere on earth. Ask the Irish what happened to their placenames under English survey maps, or ask the Native children marched into government boarding schools and handed English names at the door. Renaming a people, or naming around them without their consent, has always been a way of telling that people who is in charge of them. My insistence on the custom is small, granted, one teacher holding one line in one classroom. Small is how lines get held. Cultures rarely fall to a single blow; they erode, one warmly intended exception at a time, and the people who love them decide, each in their own corner, which exceptions stop here.

None of this walls hearing people out. Hearing people carry name signs all over the Deaf world. Children of Deaf adults often receive theirs in the crib, from the same parents who named them in English. Interpreters who have banked decades of trust carry them. Teachers, neighbors, a pastor here, a coach there: the road stands open to any hearing person willing to walk it, and the road runs through us. Nobody strolls into a dojo, wraps a black belt around his own waist, and expects the room to bow. The belt means the teachers agreed you earned it. The name means the community agreed you belong.

What my beginners get from me is their own name, taken seriously. Fingerspelling is signing; the alphabet on your hand is ASL, and your name spelled cleanly, at tempo, with the rhythm landing where it should, is already a name in my language. Communities that live in ASL compress the words they spell constantly until the spelling melts into a sign of its own; linguists call it lexicalization, and every fluent signer’s own name drifts that direction over the years. So I drill my students on their letters. I make them spell until the hand stops thinking. The wait for a name sign is an apprenticeship, and the apprenticeship is the curriculum: by the time anyone offers you a name, you will understand what is being offered, and from whom, and why it took the time it took.

When it finally happens, it happens quietly, in my experience. A gathering thins out, somebody’s hands go still for a moment, and then a handshape finds its place, at the temple, at the chin, over the heart, and makes its one small governed movement, and a person who has spent years spelling herself letter by letter watches her whole name arrive in a single motion. Given. Witnessed. Worn from that night on. My week-two student, the eager one who waits until the room empties, wants that moment now, as a souvenir of a course. What I owe her is larger than a souvenir, so my answer stays no, and inside the no, if she reads it closely, sits the whole reason to keep going. A name is waiting for her further down the road. It rests in somebody else’s hands.

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Janna Sweenie was born Deaf in Council Bluffs, Iowa, grew up at the Iowa School for the Deaf, and has taught American Sign Language at New York University for more than thirty-five years, where she created the ASL 5 course and served as Program Coordinator. She has interpreted on Broadway, taught interpreters at Juilliard, and served eighteen years as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for the Deaf for the State of New York. Her books with David Boles include Hand Jive: American Sign Language for Real Life, Day One: Learning American Sign Language in 24 Hours, and the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, including Depicting Space. She is the featured performer and lead interpreter of the ASL Opera Project, teaches the world at Hardcore ASL, and holds court every month of the year at Jannauary.com.