Born in New Hampshire in 1919, Dr. Stokoe attended Cornell University, earning his Ph.D. in English with a focus on medieval literature in 1946. He taught English at Wells College in upstate New York for several years. In 1955, Dean George Detmold convinced him to come to Gallaudet and become chairman of the English department. At this new position, Dr. Stokoe became intrigued by the structure and vocabulary of American Sign Language (ASL), which most linguists at that time believed was only a degenerate imitation of English. Dr. Stokoe created a field he called cheremics, the signed equivalent of phonetics.

In 1960, he invented a system called Stokoe notation for rendering signs in print by identifying their handshape, position, and motion, and also published his first major work on ASL, Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf. With his colleagues Dorothy Casterline and Carl Croneberg, Dr. Stokoe wrote the first dictionary of ASL, which was published in 1965. These works helped pave the way for the acceptance of ASL as a language in its own right.

In 1968, Dr. Stokoe left the English department chairmanship to join the Linguistics Department, focusing full-time on linguistics and ASL. In 1972, he founded Gallaudet’s Language Research Laboratory and became its director, as well as his creating own imprint, Linstok Press, which published a journal called Sign Language Studies. Dr. Stokoe wrote, lectured, and taught extensively on sign language, linguistics, and deaf culture until his retirement in 1984. The Language Research Laboratory was closed after Dr. Stokoe retired, and Linstok Press ceased publishing in 1996.

In 1988, Gallaudet awarded Dr. Stokoe an honorary doctorate for his work in linguistics, and he was similarly honored by Michigan’s Madonna University and the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Stokoe passed away in 2000.