How Sign Languages Express Farting
Sign languages are fully-fledged, natural languages — with their own grammar, phonology, and a rich vocabulary covering every area of life, including bodily functions. How Deaf communities around the world sign 'fart' reveals fascinating insights into how language navigates between iconicity (a sign looks like what it means) and convention — and how humor and taboo are negotiated in signed languages.
The Sign for 'Fart' in ASL and BSL
In American Sign Language (ASL), there are several signs for 'fart' that vary by region and context. The most common: one hand (or both) is held flat behind the buttocks and a brushing or blowing-away movement is made. One variant holds a fist with an extended thumb behind the backside — the thumb representing the release. In British Sign Language (BSL), the sign is similarly iconic: a hand movement that visualizes gas rising, often combined with a corresponding mouth pattern (mouthing) that suggests the sound onomatopoeically. Both signs are clearly iconic — they imitate the origin and direction of the gas. This reveals a fundamental property of sign languages: for body-related concepts, iconicity is especially frequent because body and space are directly representable.
Iconicity vs. Arbitrariness: How Signs Come to Be
Linguists distinguish between iconic signs (the sign resembles the referent) and arbitrary signs (no resemblance). Spoken languages are predominantly arbitrary — the word 'fart' doesn't look like a fart. Sign languages have a higher proportion of iconicity, especially for physical and spatial concepts. The sign for 'fart' is iconic in almost all sign languages studied so far — either by reference to the body part, the movement of gas, or both. Yet there are arbitrary elements: which hand, how high, how fast — these parameters are conventional and must be learned. Research by William Stokoe (1919–2000), who first systematically described the linguistic structure of ASL, showed that even highly iconic signs follow a grammar and behave like words — despite visual similarity to the referent.
Humor and Taboo in Deaf Communities
Bodily humor is an important part of community culture in Deaf communities worldwide. 'Deaf humor' — humor addressed to Deaf people, often involving physicality, sign language wordplay, and situational comedy — has its own tradition, cultivated in Deaf schools and clubs. The fart sign is in this context a classic element: it is visually immediate, can be varied and exaggerated (longer movement = louder fart, quick short movement = silent fart), and reliably generates laughter in community settings. Cross-cultural sign language research shows that fart jokes work particularly well in International Sign (a pidgin-like communication between Deaf people from different countries) because iconic signs are understood across cultures.
Cultural Differences: How Other Countries Sign It
Although sign languages have iconic roots, they are culturally different — even for bodily functions. In Japanese Sign Language (JSL), the sign for 'fart' is different from ASL, although both are iconic: JSL emphasizes the location, ASL the movement. In Arabic sign languages (there are several, since Arabic-speaking countries developed different languages), bodily functions carry more shame — correspondingly, the sign is more discreet and less humorously connoted. BSL differs substantially from ASL, although both countries share English as their spoken language — proof that sign languages are not derived from spoken languages but have their own developmental lines. The fart sign in BSL is different from the one in ASL. Linguistic diversity applies even to speaking about the most universal of all biological events.
Did you know?
- The sign for 'fart' is iconic in almost all studied sign languages — it imitates the origin or movement of the gas.
- BSL (British Sign Language) and ASL (American Sign Language) are completely different languages, even though their speakers share the same spoken language.
- William Stokoe first described the complete linguistic structure of ASL in 1960 — against the resistance of an establishment that refused to recognize sign languages as real languages.
- Fart jokes work particularly well in International Sign because of their cross-cultural iconicity.
Fun Fact
In a study on sign language acquisition in children, researchers found that Deaf children include the sign for 'fart' among the first 20 signs they spontaneously and creatively use — even before mastering many more 'useful' signs for everyday objects. Linguists interpreted this as evidence that emotional and social context (laughter, parental reaction) accelerates the learning of taboo words — a finding that applies to spoken languages too.
Sources
- Stokoe, W. (1960). Sign Language Structure. Studies in Linguistics.
- Sandler, W. & Lillo-Martin, D. (2006). Sign Language and Linguistic Universals. Cambridge University Press.
- Sutton-Spence, R. & Woll, B. (1999). The Linguistics of British Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.