What the Swedish-born Croneberg also observed was a surprising variety in the signed language just as within spoken communication: regional phrases, idioms and even different slang among Black and white users of American Sign Language, or ASL.

“The whole thing breaks down into local and regional groups that can be mapped geographically,” Croneberg wrote.

His work would become part of a seminal book in 1965, “A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles,” with pioneering Gallaudet linguist William Stokoe and Dorothy Casterline, a deaf colleague at Gallaudet, the only U.S. university for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The nearly 400-page volume broke ground by cataloging signs in a way the deaf community widely perceives them – by movement, form and gestured nuance – rather than alphabetically in spoken-word translations.

Croneberg, who died Aug. 7 at 92, built on the fresh approaches to ASL studies in the 1960s to help fundamentally change perceptions about the deaf community. In the dictionary, he coined the phrase “deaf culture” as having its own linguistic richness and distinctive character, including a separate dialect now known as Black American Sign Language with unique syntax, vocabulary and hand patterns.

The gradual acceptance of deaf culture opened the way for new fields of scholarly research and helped alter long-held impressions of sign language as a clumsy and imprecise form of communication. Decades later, sign language is now a common element of political events and part of many higher-education linguistic departments.

“The dictionary sparked a shift in consciousness by declaring ASL a viable language and by identifying several of the cultural characteristics of its users,” James L. Cherney, a University of Nevada at Reno associate professor of communication studies, wrote in the academic journal Argumentation and Advocacy in 1999.

“Until this time,” he continued, “ASL was mistakenly thought of as a signed version of English or a coded version of some other spoken language and was generally considered inferior to other languages.”

Carl Gustav Arvid Olof Croneberg was born April 26, 1930, in Norrbärke, Sweden, about 100 miles northwest of Stockholm. He had repeated bouts of ear infections as a boy and lost his hearing before he was a teenager, said his daughter, Lisa Croneberg. He was fluent in spoken Swedish and attended a school to learn Swedish sign language. Later, through correspondence courses, he became proficient in written English and German.

The president of Gallaudet, Leonard M. Elstad, met Croneberg in the early 1950s and suggested he study at the university. He graduated in 1955 with a degree in English. At the same time, Croneberg mastered ASL.

He joined the faculty of Catholic University while taking graduate classes, receiving a master’s degree in English in 1959. He was advised not to apply for Catholic’s doctoral program in anthropology, however, because the university thought the coursework was too challenging for someone with hearing loss, according to a Gallaudet honorary degree given to Croneberg earlier this year.

He returned to teach English at Gallaudet, where he would begin his long collaboration with Stokoe, a non-deaf professor whose early academic specialty was medieval Middle English but who became fascinated with the intricacies of sign language after joining Gallaudet’s faculty in the late 1950s.

While learning ASL, Stokoe noticed that the classroom signs were often different than the ones he saw used by students. He suspected that ASL, like any language, had its own patois and vernacular, despite the widespread scholarly perception at the time that various sign languages used around the world for centuries were simplistic and mostly utilitarian.

“It was Stokoe’s genius to see, and prove, that it was nothing of the sort; that it satisfied every linguistic criterion of a genuine language, in its lexicon and syntax, its capacity to generate an infinite number of propositions,” wrote neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in his 1989 book “Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf.”

Stokoe turned to Croneberg and Casterline as his research emissaries into the deaf community. The main ideas then took shape for the dictionary – which set out to analyze sign languages through aspects such as dez (hand shape), tab (location) and sig (movement). In an appendix, Croneberg offered the first-known published analysis of Black American Sign Language.

Different sign languages, such as French, Japanese or others, are not mutually understandable. ASL, which is also used in some countries in Africa and elsewhere, is the most common second language in other places.

Croneberg retired from Gallaudet in 1986. In addition to his daughter, of Evanston, Ill., survivors include his wife of 61 years, Eleanor Wetzel Croneberg of Silver Spring, Md.; two other children, Margaret Guthrie of Silver Spring and Eric Croneberg of Springfield, Ohio; and seven grandchildren. Croneberg died at a Rockville, Md., hospice, his family said. No cause was given.

In May, Croneberg and Casterline received honorary doctorates from Gallaudet.

The citation lauded them for “affirming that sign language as a true language, contained complexity, structure, and syntax, and was not limited to being a form of pantomime, as it was commonly regarded by linguists at that time – and many deaf people as well.”

“To skeptics who clung fast to outmoded opinions,” it added, “Mr. Croneberg has always remained a staunch defender of the native language and its variations of the global deaf community.”