The Unsung Story of 99 French Fries

Barnard College introduces the first undergraduate American Sign Language class at Columbia. 

By Willow Bradford

Illustration by Ines Alto

Class began the moment my professor’s hands raised. She greeted us with a touch of her palm to her chin and then a pat of her hand to the air, her other hand folded beneath—good afternoon in American Sign Language. Ten pairs of hands rose unevenly to mimic her, palms finding chins at slightly the wrong angle. She picked up the pad of paper and fingerspelled our names for roll call. Of course, in the beginning, roll call was a roulette of which signs kind-of-sort-of resembled the letters of your name. My hands shook and twitched as I attempted to contort my fingers into characters. 

My classmates and I were the first undergraduate students to take Elementary ASL I at Columbia, but we were far from the first to use the language.

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In 1864, after a lifetime advocating for sign language, Frederick A. P. Barnard became the 10th president of Columbia University. His career began alongside Thomas Hopkins Gaulladet, the co-founder of the first permanent institution for education of the deaf in Hartford, CT and at the New York School of the Deaf. Barnard was a staunch supporter of sign language: he himself had a hearing impairment and published an article on the topic. He understood the struggle between the two warring pedagogical approaches in deaf education; “Oralism/Visible Speech” encourages deaf students to mimic the world of sound via speaking and lip-reading while “manualism” encourages the use of sign language. Though he never created an ASL class at Columbia, he diligently helped deaf students enroll in the college.

The first approach to implementing ASL at Columbia came in 1988, when Teachers College added an ASL class to its curriculum. With a $935 per-credit fee, however, the course remained out of reach for most undergraduates. As a response to this, in the fall of 2006, Columbia and Barnard students formed CU Sign, a group dedicated to expanding ASL access on campus. Their main objective was to create an ASL class accessible to undergraduates since Brown, Princeton, Stanford, and NYU had all begun offering the language for credit. CU Sign’s campaign efforts finally paid off in April 2008 when Barnard allowed students academic credit for ASL courses taken at accredited institutions. While it wasn’t the outcome they fought for, it was a start.

In September 2025, Barnard began offering the first official ASL course for Columbia undergraduates. The program began with two elementary-level classes, and an intermediate level will be introduced this fall. At an institution in one of the most diverse cities in the world, the ASL class will help students unlock another facet of their environment and of themselves.

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Our professor moved on from roll call to basic numbers and the alphabet. It should’ve been simple to learn 26 handshapes for letters and 10 for numbers, but it wasn’t. ASL only has 30 to 50 basic handshapes but between 6,000 and 10,000 words, forcing its user to focus on the intersection between signs and facial expressions. These expressions, or ‘non-manual markers,’ are integral to the meaning of a word. ASL also asks a question of the body—what do I actually feel, and how can I convey that in my expression, my hands, my eyes? There is no room for nonchalance, no shrugging your way through a sentence or half meaning what you say. 

Take “99 French Fries.” The sign for “9” and the sign for the letter “F” are exactly the same—a touch of the pointer finger to the thumb while the other three fingers remain up. Sign “99” and you repeat that shape twice. Sign “french fries” and you sign two f’s in a row. The signs are, in isolation, indistinguishable. There is no way to distinguish whether I am 99 or I want french fries until the modifiers come into play. Our professor indicated that if we included mouth movement with our sign, for example mouthing “ninety nine” then the sign would become “99” rather than “french fries” and vice versa. 

In the same way, some conjunctions like “because” and “and” don’t exist as actual signs, but as movements of the body. “Because” is replaced with the sign for “why” and “and” with a simple shoulder shift. There are no “um so like” filler words that let us stream our consciousness out of our brain without really using any of it. You have to understand, intimately, what you’re feeling in order to express it. 

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Time moves slower now, one year into the rules and opportunities of a new language. What started as stumbling through signing my name has evolved into me noticing the little signs in my movements that indicate how I’m feeling; and when I can only see an outline of my friends through the crowd and strobing lights, I’ll understand what they wish to express and without uttering a word, the story of American Sign Language at Columbia will begin to sing.