The Regionalism Excuse -vs- Poor Receptive Skills
When ‘regionalisms’ in ASL become a language learner’s convenient excuse for poor receptive skills.

Over the years I’ve noticed a reoccurring theme in the comment section of ASL videos. There’s lot of ASL learners on the internet who act like ASL experts. This is not the majority, but there are quite a few to be found lurking in comment sections across the web.

I don’t know what this phenomenon is all about, but somehow these learning-ASL-in-real-life, but ASL-expert-on-the-internet have managed to turn the concept of regional signs into an excuse for not understanding content in ASL. Blaming “regionalisms” instead of admitting to poor receptive skills is an Olympic Sport where everyone can win a gold medal. Dropping the words 'different dialect' is like some kind of quick-fix bandaid for bruised egos.

I see words like ‘regional differences’ and ‘dialect’ thrown around way outside of the expected context of: ‘Hey that’s not the sign I learned for that word,” or “I’ve never seen that sign before in my life.”

Instead I’ve seen more than a few discussions in comment sections using these terms as a blanket-concepts to cover up poor receptive skills: “I did not understand anything in this video and I’m in ASL __fill-in-the-blank__, but hey, sign language varies from region to region, so I think this person is just using a different dialect of sign language.”
Uhh. What?

I distinctly remember a conversation thread between language learners on a video where someone signed a creative ASL poem. Somehow two of them came to the brilliant conclusion that the reason they didn’t understand what the video was about was due to ‘regional differences’ — further down in the comment thread they explained it (coming across as confident, authoritative, and knowledgeable) to a third person who knew nothing at all about sign language. The impression these signers 'from a different region' painted was that ASL doesn’t have any common set of rules, no structure, no real solidified agreed-upon base for people to be able to communicate via a real language if they live in ‘different regions’.

There is a lot of language diversity and linguistic variance in ASL. No question.

When a different sign pops up it can absolutely cause some confusion, but that doesn’t mean a ‘regional sign’ changes the language itself. Mutual intelligibility is still there. People from Cali and DC can still converse without issue, even when different sign choices are used or when a new sign pops up in a conversation. Familiarity with the language and strong receptive skills allows you to understand content and context — these are the things that power your cloze skills. And while it might cause a hiccup, more often than not, a ‘regional sign’ isn’t going to completely halt all communication and comprehension from happening.