Carol Yuknis giggled silently as her friend Christina Derhammer chattered to her. Derhammer flailed her arms and bugged out her eyes as she described meeting a woman she hadn't seen in ages.
But no sound came from Derhammer's mouth, or from Yuknis. The only noise was the chuckling of six adult students watching the friends talk in sign language Tuesday night.
Derhammer and Yuknis, who are both deaf, team-teach a new American Sign Language course they created at Northampton Community College to demonstrate how deaf and hard-of-hearing people combine signs, slang and body language in real-life conversations.
"We took it a step further -- we want to show them sign language in real time," said Yuknis, who has taught sign language at NCC since 1988.
Officials at NCC and at Lehigh Carbon Community College said they don't know of any other team-taught sign language class in the Lehigh Valley.
Most colleges, including NCC, can't afford to pay two native speakers of any non-English language to teach a single class. But Derhammer and Yuknis, both of Bethlehem Township, were so intent on showing students real-life interaction that they halved their pay so they could teach together, said Carolyn Zanoni, who coordinates NCC's community education programs.
The class began in September and ends next week.
Derhammer, an NCC sign language instructor since 2005, and Yuknis became friends nine years ago after meeting through the Lehigh Valley's small community of deaf people. Both have day jobs -- Yuknis works for the U.S. Postal Service, Derhammer is a chef -- and both can speak well enough that a patient listener can understand them.
But they turn off their voices in class each week, which sounds great to students like Rebecca Ormesher of Hanover Township, Northampton County. "This is how the deaf actually speak," she said.
During the class's meeting Tuesday, Yuknis and Derhammer silently pinged words and ideas off each other as the class of six women laughed and tried to keep up. Derhammer showed them how exaggerated movements and facial expressions can transform a sign that means "He's a little stupid" into one that means "He's really, really stupid!"
Ormesher already knew a lot of signs, but she said the class is showing her how deaf people merge those signs and invent shortcuts to communicate ideas like "I'm not sure."
"When I learned sign language, I would have said "not sure,"' she said, making the signs for "not" and then "sure." Instead, most deaf people would use just one sign, she explained: splitting the fingers of one hand and teetering it on the edge of the other, like a person who is literally "on the fence."
Yuknis and Derhammer also showed the class more than a dozen other ASL slang expressions, such as "Hit the sack" or "Huh?" They showed how signs for the letters "D," "U" and "H" fluidly combine with a forehead slap to mean "Duh!" And making the sign of an "L" on the forehead means the same thing to deaf people that it does to everyone else: "Loser!"
At least 75 people a year take sign language classes at NCC, making ASL one of the most popular languages it offers, Zanoni said. Some students are studying to become sign language interpreters, but most just want to communicate better with deaf people they meet through their jobs or with deaf relatives.
"My granddaughter, who is going to be 9, is going deaf," said Ann Goldberg of Bethlehem, one of Yuknis and Derhammer's students. "Going to this class helped me so much, because I realized there's such a vibrant deaf community," she said.
The Lehigh Valley has only a small deaf population, but its members get together occasionally at events like subtitled movies or plays with sign language interpreters, Derhammer said.
Deaf communities across the country are dwindling, in part because medical procedures have allowed many deaf children to hear. But as long as deaf communities exist, Yuknis said, she hopes to help nondeaf people understand them.
"The people outside our world have to communicate with us," Yuknis said. Whether they sign or use "writing, gestures, body language -- it doesn't matter how, as long as they make an effort to communicate."
Yuknis and Derhammer plan to offer their conversational sign language class again in the spring at NCC.