[2] Deaf people are exposed to the oral language that surrounds them, if only in visual forms like lip reading or writing, from early childhood.
Within everyday life it is not uncommon for Deaf people to be in contact with oral languages.
Deaf people in the United States may use a more English-like signing style in a more formal setting, or if unfamiliar with the interlocutor.
[7][8] When two sign languages meet, the expected contact phenomena occurs: lexical borrowing, foreign "accent", interference, code switching, pidgins, creoles and mixed systems.
When a loan translation becomes fully acceptable and considered as 'native' (rather than Contact Signing) is a matter over which native signers will differ in opinion.
In such bilingual communities, loan translations are common enough that deeper grammatical structures may also be borrowed from the oral language, which is known as metatypy.
In the sign languages with such a system, the manual alphabet is structurally quite different from the more 'native' grammatical forms, which are often spatial, visually motivated, and multilayered.
Manual alphabets facilitate the input of new terms such as technical vocabulary from the dominant oral language of the region and allow a transliteration of phrases, names, and places.
Hearing adults who grew up in deaf signing households as children of deaf adults (CODAs) sometimes communicate with one another in spoken and written English and knowingly use ASL loan translations and underlying grammatical forms.