Dorothy Casterline

Casterline was born Dorothy Sueoka on April 27, 1928,[1][2] to parents of Japanese descent, and she grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii.[3][4][5][6] She became deaf at age 14.[7] After graduating from the Hawaii School for the Deaf and the Blind, then known as the Diamond Head School for the Deaf, she obtained a bachelor's degree in English from Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. in 1958.[4][5][8] She was the first deaf Hawaiian student to graduate from Gallaudet. She married fellow alumnus Jim Casterline, and they remained married until his death in 2012.[9][10]

While at Gallaudet, she and her colleague Carl Croneberg were recruited by the linguist William Stokoe to contribute to their joint work A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles.[4][3][11] Published in 1965, the dictionary is considered a seminal text in the study of ASL, which promoted greater interest in and respect for the language.[4][5][11][12] It was innovative in treating ASL as a real and natural language, rather than a variant of English.[5][13] Casterline played an important role as a deaf collaborator with the hearing professor Stokoe over the several years it took to produce the dictionary.[5] Stokoe also valued the multicultural makeup of his team, with Casterline's Asian Pacific Islander background and Croneberg's Swedish one.[14] As part of this project, she collaborated with Stokoe and Croneberg beginning in 1960 on a study of the syntax and dialects of American Sign Language under funding provided by the National Science Foundation.[15]

Casterline was living in Laurel, Maryland, as of 1994.[16] In 2022, She was given an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Gallaudet, in recognition of her contributions to ASL linguistics and deaf studies.[8] She died on August 8, 2023, at age 95.[1][7][17]