Are there regional accents in ASL? Lazy google suggests there are foreign accents, but within one SL?
There are definitely regional (and other) dialects. "Accents" maybe, depending on your definition of accent, but no big studies have been done here to identify them. There's a lot more research on variation in B(ritish)SL.
A lot of the regional variation historically was based on which Deaf School people went to. So, for example, Eastern PA where people went to PSD (in Philly) have a sign for birthday that's different from either of the more typical ones.
Their sign for "Santa Claus" is to make a motion like throwing a battery.
3: It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him, and it turns out that it's the same if you just wave your hands?
7: deaf people are nicer than hearing people; we just say "oh that's a different sign than mine!"
8: thank you!
5: IMHMHB that Irish Sign Language used to have two nearly mutually unintelligible varieties, one used by women and one by men, because the deaf schools were single-sex.
And Black ASL, with origins in segregated deaf schools, is alive and thriving (mutually intelligible but with systematic difference from standard ASL).
Are there regional accents in ASL? Lazy google suggests there are foreign accents, but within one SL?
There definitely are accents in BSL. I've been doing quite a bit of work on accessibility and was amazed to discover that a Scottish BSL user: can tell if someone's Scottish; can tell whether they learned BSL in Edinburgh or Glasgow; and, if they're a Glaswegian BSL user, they can tell whether they're Protestant or Catholic, presumably for the same reason as 11 mentions. (I didn't ask if there was a specific Jewish Glaswegian BSL accent. I suspect the Deaf Jewish Glaswegian community is probably too small for it to be distinguishable from just "the way that guy signs".)