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As early as 1541 at first contact by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, there were reports that the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains widely spoke a sign language to communicate across vast national and linguistic lines.

In the 19th century, a "triangle" of village sign languages developed in New England: one in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; one in Henniker, New Hampshire, and one in Sandy River Valley, Maine. Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL), which was particularly important for the history of ASL, was used mainly in Chilmark, Massachusetts.

Due to intermarriage in the original community of English settlers of the 1690s, and the recessive nature of genetic deafness, Chilmark had a high 4% rate of genetic deafness.  MVSL was used even by hearing residents whenever a deaf person was present,  and also in some situations where spoken language would be ineffective or inappropriate, such as during church sermons or between boats at sea.

ASL is thought to have originated in the American School for the Deaf (ASD), founded in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817.  Originally known as The American Asylum, At كلمات اغنية اجمل فرحة مهى فتوني Hartford, For The Education And Instruction Of The Deaf And Dumb, the school was founded by the Yale graduate and divinity student Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Gallaudet, inspired by his success in demonstrating the learning abilities of a young deaf girl Alice Cogswell, traveled to Europe in order to learn deaf pedagogy from European institutions.

Ultimately, Gallaudet chose to adopt the methods of the French Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris, and convinced Laurent Clerc, an assistant to the school's founder Charles-Michel de l'Épée, to accompany him back to the United States. Upon his return, Gallaudet founded the ASD on April 15, 1817.

More schools for the deaf were founded after ASD, and knowledge of ASL spread to those schools.  In addition, the rise of Deaf community organizations bolstered the continued use of ASL.  Societies such as the National Association of the Deaf and the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf held national conventions that attracted signers from across the country.  All of that contributed to ASL's wide use over a large geographical area, atypical of a sign language.

While oralism, an approach to educating deaf students focusing on oral language, had previously been used in American schools, the Milan Congress made it dominant and effectively banned the use of sign languages at schools in the United States and Europe.

However, the efforts of Deaf advocates and educators, more lenient enforcement of the Congress's mandate, and the use of ASL in religious education and proselytism ensured greater use and documentation compared to European sign languages, albeit more influenced by fingerspelled loanwords and borrowed idioms from English as students were societally pressured to achieve fluency in spoken language.

Nevertheless, oralism remained the predominant method of deaf education up to the 1950s. Linguists did not consider sign language to be true "language" but as something inferior.

Recognition of the legitimacy of ASL was achieved by William Stokoe, a linguist who arrived at Gallaudet University in 1955 when that was still the dominant assumption. Aided by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Stokoe argued for manualism, the use of sign language in deaf education. Stokoe noted that sign language shares the important features that oral languages have as a means of communication, and even devised a transcription system for ASL. In doing so, Stokoe revolutionized both deaf education and linguistics. In the 1960s, ASL was sometimes referred to as "Ameslan", but that term is now considered obsolete.