The Deaf as a Cultural andLinguistic Minority

Volume 3 No 2 - 2000

The Deaf as a Cultural and Linguistic Minority: Implications for the Hybridisation of Sign

Lee Fullwood, The Royal School for the Deaf, Exeter
Lynn Williams, University of Exeter

For deaf people, vision rather than audition is the critical link with the world and British Sign Language or BSL is the preferred means of communication of many of Britain's deaf people (Myklebust 1964; Ling 1976). According to a number of scholars, this visual-gestural language evolved independently of the language of the hearing population (Stokoe 1994; Isham 1995) and is, therefore, not a visual means of representing spoken English (although systems such as signed English also exist). In other words, there is no direct link between the grammar of BSL and that of spoken English (Brennan and Colville, 1979). If we were to characterise it briefly, we might say that BSL is voiceless, has its own syntax and exploits body and facial language, although mouth patterns, together with finger spelling, may also be used to provide important additional back-up information. It has even been suggested, quite rightly in our view, that the structural organisation of sign is radically different from that of spoken language (DeMatteo, quoted in Brennan 1986) and that sign may more usefully be grouped with pidgins and creoles than with other types of natural language (Edwards & Ladd 1984). Syntactically, it has been described as a predicate classifier language, at least in its British version (Kyle & Woll, 1985); semantically, it has been described as a 'topic comment' language (Deuchar 1983 & 1984; Loncke et al. 1986).

What is rarely considered in the literature on the Deaf community[1] and its language, however, is the extent to which the language of hearing people has influenced sign. A brief history of deaf education programmes may thus help to put into context both the marginalisation of the Deaf and the influence which the hearing world has had on their language. We can begin our historical sketch in the ancient world. Whereas the ancient Hebrews appear to have displayed a somewhat enlightened attitude towards the deaf ('Thou shalt not curse the deaf ...' (Leviticus XIX:14)), the Greeks were of the opinion that speech was of divine origin and that deaf people should be denied education on the grounds that the decree of the Gods should not be tampered with. McLoughlin (1987: 1) has the following to say on this matter:

Hebraic law and Greek philosophy were the twin paths by which deaf people entered the stage in human history, the former to afford them some legal protection and the latter to condemn them to two thousand years of misunderstanding.

McLoughlin's statement strongly suggests that the Deaf were denied a meaningful place in Greek society. A similar attitude may have influenced the interpretation of Scripture in early Christian times and, perhaps, even led to the Deaf being denied access to religion throughout Europe. Markides (1985: 145), for example, reminds us of St. Paul's observation in Romans X:17 that 'faith is obtained through hearing' and maintains not only that this passage of Scripture was quoted time and again in support of this view but also that it was eventually taken to mean that the Deaf would be deprived of salvation. Furthermore, Roman law, as put together by Justinian in the sixth century and adopted by the neo-Latin nations, was nothing less than absolute in its denial of civil rights to the congenitally deaf, and the feudal laws of Western Europe, quite independently, 'made similar prohibitions, the deaf not being permitted the enjoyment of fiefs and of feudal privileges' (Farrar 1923: 3). Now, it is possible that there is a direct link between the legal status of the Deaf in these countries and the rise of schools for the Deaf. For example, the first teacher of the Deaf in the modern era is usually regarded to have been Pedro Ponce de Léon (1510-1584). During his lifetime, the wealth and power of Spain lay in the hands of a few noble families. Possibly as a result of frequent intermarriage between these families, the occasional congenitally deaf child was born. Heirs apparent to vast estates and enormous wealth, these children were, nevertheless, disinherited by laws which considered the deaf and dumb to be legally incapable and thus ineligible to own property or to make wills. Clearly, these children stood to benefit legally and financially if they could be taught to articulate speech and so it is not impossible that the deaf children of Spain's ruling classes were placed in monasteries not merely so that they might be cared for but also that they might be taught to speak.

Pedro Ponce de León, a Benedictine monk, came into contact with some of these children in the monastery of San Salvador, where he resided. Apparently, he decided to teach them the 'comforts of religious belief' and in so doing he discovered a way of communicating with them' (Markides 1985: 146). Initially, he tried to communicate with his first charge through the medium of writing. However, he switched gradually to oral communication and eventually succeeded in getting the child to produce speech. As a result of this demonstration that a deaf child could be taught to speak and act appropriately, 'great ingenuity had to be exercised to explain away the old law, by which he was excluded from the rights of primogeniture to which he was otherwise entitled' (Farrar 1923: 3-4).

The Deaf have always found it hard to be accepted as deaf people in a world which is constantly trying to make them into 'hearing' people. Historically, it seems that they were accorded legal rights only because it was demonstrated that they could be successfully assimilated into the hearing world. It is hardly surprising, then, that Pedro Ponce de Léon's success should have encouraged further experimentation with education techniques for the Deaf. Almost immediately, he was followed by Manuel Ramírez de Carrión (1579-1652), the man later to be acknowledged as the inventor of speech training for the Deaf. Ramírez de Carrión taught speech using a phonetic method, which involved presenting individual letters of the alphabet in the way they should be pronounced. By associating individual letters with specific sounds, Ramírez de Carrión claimed that he could teach hearing people to read and write in two weeks and even teach the Deaf to speak (Markides 1985).

A third important figure, who may well have drawn on the work of Ponce de León and Ramírez de Carrión even though he claimed that his work was entirely his own (Markides 1985), was Juan Pablo Martín Bonet (1579-1633). So far as we know, Bonet was the first to publish a method for educating the Deaf. According to this method, the Deaf were taught to read, write, and use the one-handed manual alphabet probably invented by Pedro Ponce de Léon (Woll, 1987) before learning to speak. Specifically, training in speech involved first learning to make the vowel sounds, often by copying a crude model of a tongue, and, subsequently, to produce consonants and monosyllabic words. According to Markides (1985: 148), the impact of the work of these great Spanish pioneers was felt throughout Europe, including the United Kingdom.

Towards the latter part of the eighteenth century, certain important developments took place in France. Here it was that Charles Michel, otherwise known as the Abbé de l'Épée, led the fight against the notion held by fellow priests that teaching the Deaf to speak was contrary to God's will and, in so doing, developed his own method for teaching the Deaf (Markides 1985). In 1755, he opened the first public institution for the education of the Deaf in Paris (Grant 1990), thus breaking with the established pattern of offering this kind of education only to the offspring of the rich. Almost immediately, he was inundated with destitute deaf mutes. In order to cope with the large numbers of children, he very soon concluded, ironically and perhaps with much regret, that only a manual method of teaching would prove both effective and efficient (McLoughlin 1990). The system which he then went on to develop was highly structured and placed little emphasis on original composition and conversation, apparently focussing much more on the deaf student's ability to memorise sentences appropriate to their own particular needs (Quigley & Paul 1984: 14). Education was thus imparted largely in silence, using signs which the abbot took directly from the Deaf community, together with those which he invented for the purpose of representing the inflections, tenses, articles, and other grammatical features of French. His system for teaching the Deaf became known as the French Method.

Although the Abbé de l'Épée seems to have been prompted to develop a manual method of teaching largely because of the pressure of student numbers, academic support for his approach was not long in coming. In fact, the manual method was regarded by many eighteenth and nineteenth-century French academics in rather a positive light. The following are examples of the kind of support it received:

(i) '...manual signs of deaf-mutes give us more exact and precise ideas than those usually acquired with the aid of hearing' (Condillac 1776).
(ii) '...spoken languages cannot represent ideas other than through the mediation of sounds. The language of signs represents them directly. Our languages are thus, so as (sic) to speak, further from objects than is the language of signs' (Desloges 1779)
(iii) '...manual signs [...] produce ideas and thoughts as clear as those of chemical nomenclature ... I thus believe that if manual language has any kind of superiority, this can be seen above all in its expounding of the acts of the understanding '(Bébian 1817). (All quoted in Pennisi 1995: 93-94).[2]

One of de l'Épée's students, the Abbé Sicard, continued his work. In fact, he opened a school of his own and published in 1818 an important study entitled Théorie des Signes, which included a grammar and dictionary of sign language.

At around about the same time as the Abbé de l'Épée founded his school in Paris, Samuel Heinicke was developing in Germany his own exclusively oral approach to teaching the Deaf. He was invited to open the first school for the deaf in Germany and this he did in Saxony in 1778. So popular did his approach become that it came to be known as the German Method (McLoughlin 1990).

Heinicke was influenced by Johann Conrad Amman, the founder of the oralist method (Markides 1985). So far as we can tell, Amman did not consider the lack of hearing to be an insurmountable obstacle to the task of speaking, maintaining instead that practice was more important for the correct articulation of sounds than the passive activity of listening. According to him, 'anyone who has learned to speak, whether deaf or endowed with hearing, thus [has] need of prolonged practice so that his organs can acquire the necessary aptitude and flexibility' (quoted in Pennisi 1995: 109). He also seems to have regarded speech as bestowing a certain superior quality upon humanity, arguing that 'it is chiefly in the voice that the spirit of life which animates us dwells, and through the voice that it finds outer expression; the voice is the interpreter of the heart, the sign of passions and concupiscence' (quoted in Pennisi 1995: 95). Absence of speech, then, was considered by Amman to constitute something of a prison for the human spirit and in this he was, perhaps, not very far from the position of the ancient Greeks. Now, although Heinicke drew his inspiration initially from Amman, his method of teaching the Deaf evolved with time and he came ultimately to reject his mentor's instructional methods in the belief that the spoken language could be taught before writing and that a deaf child could learn to speak in much the same way as a hearing child (Ewing & Ewing 1954). The important point to make here, though, is that with the Abbé de l'Épée and with Heinicke, the debate 'between the supporters of artificial semiotics (re-education based on manual signs) and supporters of natural semiotics (pedagogical techniques for rehabilitating subjects to the spoken word)' began in earnest (Pennisi 1995: 93). Interestingly, the very same arguments which these two scholars deployed in support of their respective positions are still with us today, albeit in more refined form. Despite the considerable differences in approach, however, both had one thing in common. Neither focussed on assisting the Deaf to develop or expand their own particular variety of language. The German method, as indicated, advocated the use of an oral only approach and the acquisition of speech, taking no account of what kind of language the Deaf might have produced spontaneously if left to their own devices. Even the French method, which used a form of sign language based originally on signs taken from the Deaf community, gradually came to rely more and more on its own concocted version of sign, whose syntax largely followed that of French. In other words, the impact of the hearing world is clear to see in both cases. Given the nature of the Deaf community, this is, perhaps, inevitable, as we shall see below.

The first school for the education of deaf children in Britain opened in 1760 in Edinburgh. This and other early schools followed what was called a combined educational approach, using sign language and also encouraging the development of speech. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, most schools had come to rely almost entirely on manual methods. This state of affairs might well have persisted had it not been for the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf held in Milan in 1880. At this Congress, the following resolutions were adopted:

1. The convention considers the incontestable superiority of speech over sign, a) for restoring deaf-mutes to social life, and b) for giving them greater facility of language, and declares that the method of articulation should have preference over that of sign in instruction and education of the deaf and dumb.
2. Considering that the simultaneous use of signs and speech has the disadvantage of ignoring speech and lip-reading and precision of ideas, the Convention declares that the oral method ought to be preferred (Grant 1990: 8).

Following the Congress, schools in Britain, together with those in the rest of Europe which had previously preferred a manual approach to deaf education, quickly adopted the oral method. Sign language in British schools was gradually forced underground as the reaction against it strengthened in the early years of the century (Bates 1985: 140). In fact, such was the antipathy towards sign at this time that one writer felt able to declare that 'everyone ... regards (signing) as the arch-enemy of language' (Story 1925: 41).

The Royal School for the Deaf in Exeter can serve as a useful example of what has happened in many schools in Britain since then. Staunchly oral until 1978, it finally accepted that oralism was not the answer for all deaf children and began to look for ways to supplement the oral method, eventually embracing Total Communication (TC). TC is an approach which recognizes the right of the deaf child to use all forms of communication for the purpose of formal education (Denton 1987) and implies that in order to process language efficiently, deaf children require some sort of visual symbolic system in addition to speech and lip-reading. TC, then, embodies an approach that involves manual/gestural, auditory, and oral forms of communication, which, when used together, give a complete picture of what is being communicated (Clare 1981). But if TC utilises sign, this again is manually encoded English, not BSL and the general approach followed is, therefore, somewhat akin to the original methods of de l'Épée. It must be stressed, however, that this should not be taken to mean that BSL is stigmatized in TC schools. In fact, the children are actively encouraged to acquire BSL, this being the variety which is currently taught in the Exeter school to Key Stage 4 students (14-16 year olds).

The medium of instruction in school is clearly a critical issue for the Deaf because if they do not come into contact with sign language, specifically BSL (in Britain), as children, they are unlikely to become native or even near-native users of the language (Birdsong 1992). As one of the few places where the Deaf come together to form a community, the school environment is extremely important for the acquisition and transmission of Deaf language and culture. Education, however, is often more a commitment to the wishes of parents than to the needs of children and many hearing parents prefer their children to have their prime identity within the hearing world. If children with disabilities can be assisted to become part of the able-bodied world, the place of the parents is often less disturbed. Parents of children who do not or will not fit into this world, inevitably share their children's negative social identity. As has been pointed out, parents are not necessarily so interested in improving the functioning of their disabled offspring as they are in making them function in the most able-bodied manner (Weinberg & Sterritt 1986). Consistent with this is a report by Schlesinger & Meadows (1972) that deaf children of deaf parents are likely to be more mature, responsible, and independent than deaf children of hearing parents. This study shows that the hearing status of parents affects both their attitude towards their children and the way the children feel about themselves. Parents, however, are not the only ones who are culpable. The influence of powerful 'others' (e.g. doctors, teachers) also encourages the imposition of a hearing identity upon deaf children (Ladd 1981; Lewis 1987; Woodward et al. 1988; Erting 1988).

The Deaf, then, have been denied a separate identity, particularly with regard to their culture and language. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that they have no written language and no discrete, identifiable territory. It may also have to do with the fact that there are likely to be no monolingual speakers of BSL and that the majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents (only about 5% of deaf children are born to deaf parents). Acquisition of sign language and Deaf culture is thus only really possible when the child comes into contact with Deaf persons in the community. These contacts often lead to a high degree of bonding as deaf children, quite naturally, tend to seek friendship with other deaf children, with the result that the density and multiplexity of deaf social networks increase with age. In the hearing world, the opposite tends to happen.

Since the 18th century, schools for the deaf have acted as the main transmitters of sign language and Deaf culture, even though many of them have used only oral methods of teaching. In fact, it has been suggested that each school for the deaf has its own distinct variety of sign (Deuchar 1984), which is passed on to each new generation of children as part of an evolving and richly varied Deaf culture (Stokoe 1983).

BSL, or the language which deaf people in Britain acquire most easily and towards which they appear to shift quite spontaneously as they grow older (Brennan 1986) did not achieve academic recognition as a fully functional and efficient linguistic system in its own right until the mid 1970s (Edwards & Ladd 1984). Symptomatic of this rather tardy interest is the fact that British Sign Language has only been an accepted linguistic label since 1976. The same may be said of other European countries too. For example, Russian Sign Language (RSL) was introduced as a label to designate the sign language of Russians only in 1991 (Pursglove, 1995). Despite academic acceptance, however, prejudice with regard to sign language still abounds. It came very much as a surprise to one of the authors to hear a teacher of the deaf tell a young deaf boy some time ago not to wave his arms around: 'That's what monkeys do', he said. The boy had been signing to one of his friends in the school which he attended and in which an oral only environment was being promoted. Clearly, the battle to achieve wider recognition for BSL is still a long way from having been won.

The principal creative and sustaining power of Deaf language and culture has been urbanisation. Stokoe (1987: 9), for example, explains that 'as a face-to-face-only language, a deaf signage needs the concentration of urban life'. Despite the benefits of urbanisation, such as the provision of a critical mass of deaf people for the development and transmission of Deaf language and culture, contact with hearing people has led, inevitably, to a degree of Anglicisation of BSL. This should hardly surprise us. As a minority group, the Deaf may usefully be compared, at least in some ways, with the Gipsies. Neither group possesses a discrete and separate territory and, therefore, cannot keep itself entirely apart from other ethnic/linguistic groups. This fact must, of necessity, have had, and will surely continue to have, a profound and enduring impact on their languages. Like the language of the Deaf, the language of English Gipsies, for example, has been described as a creole. Although deriving originally from a highly inflected language, Romany has gradually adopted the grammar of English, whilst keeping its native vocabulary (Acton 1974). A similar transformation has been seen to have occurred in every country in which Gipsies (les tsiganes) have come to reside: 'Il (the Gipsy tongue) a subi de nombreuses transformations selon les pays et se présente parfois comme langue secrète, dont le vocabulaire seul est tsigane, avec une grammaire empruntée à la langue du pays' (Cohen 1952: 24).

In the case of BSL, hybridisation exists both at the level of the lexis and at the level of syntax and manifests itself in a number of important ways. First, the incorporation of manual alphabets, dating from the initial period of education, has enabled the direct importation of spoken language through finger-spelling. Some signs, such as the sign for the mini (car), are thus merely stylised versions of finger spelling. Other signs, such as the one for mad (crazy) also have their origin in fingerspelling but the location of the finger spelling has since moved from the hands to another part of the body (in this case, the head). The signs for mini and mad are now decoded as single signs, which are read logographically so that accurate fingerspelling is not essential for identifying the sign. Second, the accepted use of lip patterns, which mimic spoken language and are often an important way of distinguishing homographs (ideas/words with the same handshape, location in space etc.), is most likely to be a consequence of almost a hundred years of oral education. In such cases, lip patterns can add sophistication to BSL by introducing synonyms where previously there were none. For example, the manual sign for rely is the same as that for depend, whereas the lip pattern is obviously different. Lip patterns, then, not only provide the observer with useful back-up information but may also help to disambiguate when dealing with polysemic signs. Third, situational influences, such as formal and public events, often result in the use of a word order which is more similar to that of English than to the sequence we would normally expect in BSL. In short, although contact with English has undoubtedly led to the de-naturalisation of sign, it has also enriched it, especially in the area of the lexis.

To conclude, the Deaf have always lived alongside the hearing population, despite being separated by language. Today, after many attempts over many years to assimilate them into the hearing world, the Deaf are beginning to campaign for the introduction of a bilingual education programme in which BSL is the main medium of instruction and English is taught as a second language. Although such a development would almost certainly enable the Deaf to raise their level of competence in BSL, it seems certain that linguistic interference and assimilation would continue to be very much the order of the day.

Notes:

[1] Here the word Deaf is written with a capitalized D to denote a 'community of deaf people who share a common (sign) language and culture'. When written with a lower-case d, it refers to the condition of being deaf or without hearing. This is the convention which is generally used in Deaf Studies and is the one which we follow in this paper.

[2] The language used in the quotations included in this paper is sometimes a little strange. For the most part, this is because it has been produced by non-native speakers of English. Only exceptionally has it been modified so as to leave the meaning clear.

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