Aslı

Aslı is a Turkish female given name. It is derived from the Turkish noun Aslı whose meanings include first one, original, ace, primordial, genuine, original, origin, origination, extraction, foundation, gist, groundwork, provenance, root stock, fountain head. It is used as a nickname for the heroine in the 16th century Turkic tale "Kerem ile Aslı" after the hero asks her ""Why do you want me to leave you? What is the essence of your wish?” (“Aslı” means “essence”).

Given name

American Sign Language

American Sign Language (ASL) is the predominant sign language of deaf communities in the United States and most of anglophone Canada. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has propagated widely via schools for the deaf and deaf community organizations. Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken, though reliable estimates for American ASL users range from 250,000 to 500,000 persons, including a number of children of deaf adults. ASL users face stigma due to beliefs in the superiority of oral language to sign language, compounded by the fact that ASL is often glossed in English due to the lack of a standard writing system.

ASL19

ASL19 (Persian: اصل ١٩) is an independent technology and research organization that helps Iranians circumvent Internet censorship and access information online. Based in Toronto, ASL19 was founded in 2011 with the support of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

Concerned with questions of digital security, Internet freedom, privacy, and surveillance, ASL19 distributes open source circumvention tools like Psiphon, provides user support, and distributes information and guides on digital safety. The organization also conducts research in relation to media censorship in Iran, and has published reports on information controls in the lead up to 2013 presidential elections, the political evolution of the Iranian Internet, the effects of sanctions on independent publishers in Iran, and Internet censorship in the wake of the 2009 presidential elections (with the OpenNet Initiative and Citizen Lab).

ASL19 supports Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“asl” meaning “article” in Persian), which reads: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”