In the United States, deaf culture was born in Connecticut in 1817 at the American School for the Deaf, when a deaf teacher from France, Laurent Clerc, was recruited by Thomas Gallaudet to help found the new institution. Under the guidance and instruction of Clerc in language and ways of living, deaf American students began to evolve their own strategies for communication and for living, which became the kernel for the development of American Deaf culture. Introduction A Deaf American is defined as a member of the American Sign Language (ASL) linguistic minority. Though they are medically deaf, children of Deaf people and a few hearing people who learn ASL can become adopted into the wider Deaf community. Inversely, Deaf American is not inclusive to all people with hearing loss but only those who use ASL as their primary language. Terminology deaf and Deaf In 1972, Professor James Woodward, co-director of the Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 2004, proposed a distinction between deafness and the Deaf culture. He suggested using deaf (written with a lower case d) to refer to the audiological condition of deafness, and Deaf (written with an upper case D) to refer to Deaf culture. A U.S. state regulation from the Colorado Department of Human Services defines Deaf (uppercase) as "A group of people, with varying hearing acuity, whose primary mode of communication is a visual language (predominantly American Sign Language (ASL) in the United States) and have a shared heritage and culture," and has a separate definition for deaf (lowercase). This convention has been widely adopted within the culture and the scholarly literature in English, and to some extent in other languages. The two terms are also widely used to refer to distinct but partially overlapping groups of people: deaf people (those with significant hearing loss) vs. Deaf people (those who identify with Deaf culture and use a sign language as a primary means of communication). Not everyone makes this distinction, however; some point out that there are many ways to be "deaf" and a simple two-way distinction is too confining. "People-first" language rejected In Deaf culture, person-first language (i.e., person who is deaf, person who is hard of hearing) has long been rejected since being culturally Deaf is seen as a source of positive identity and pride. Instead, Deaf culture uses Deaf-first language: Deaf person