Much is rightly made of the need to promote Britain鈥檚 indigenous languages
鈥 Welsh, Gaelic, even Cornish. But the plight of another language, used
by more than 50,000 Britons, seldom hits the headlines. Worse, many teachers
still actively discourage, and even ban, its use in the classroom. This
neglected and vilified language is British Sign Language, the language of
the Deaf community in Britain. (Not all deaf people use sign language, but
most do, and they describe themselves as 鈥楧eaf鈥 to underline the cultural
and linguistic reference. For the sake of simplicity, however, we use the
lower case throughout).
Most hearing people still do not realise that British Sign Langusge,
or BSL, is just as much a language as English or Russian. British Sign Language
is not an inferior mixture of simple gesture and mime, nor a system for
spelling out English words. It has no written form, but neither do two-thirds
of the world鈥檚 languages. Rather, it conveys complex meanings and subtle
nuances in both space and time, with shifts of perspective and points of
view that some liken to cinematography. It is a language, just as rich in
vocabulary, syntax and grammar as the spoken and written varieties, and
it is learnt in the same way.
British children growing up deaf in contact with other deaf people learn
BSL as their natural first language. And there are many different sign languages,
each evolving independently among different communities scattered about
the globe. Not surprisingly, BSL and Australian Sign Language share some
features, yet both are quite different from American Sign Language, thanks
to the proselytising zeal of a deaf Frenchman in 18th-century America who
set up an influential college for deaf students. Nor do national boundaries
always coincide with those of sign language. There is only one Belgian Sign
Language, used by both Walloon and Flemish signers, but Ireland has two
sign languages one used by the Protestant and the other by the Catholic
deaf communities.
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Yet, just 30 years ago, linguists had failed to recognise these languages
in their midst, and only now have researchers begun to understand their
structure and development. For deaf people, the consequences of this academic
oversight have been severe. One result is that when deaf children in Britain
go to school they cannot learn about the world or about other languages
via their preferred language, as most hearing teachers of deaf children,
even in special schools, do not know BSL. 鈥楳ost teachers of the deaf can鈥檛
communicate with me as a deaf adult, let alone with a child,鈥 states Clark
Denmark, a Deaf Research Fellow at the University of Durham. Most deaf children
are expected somehow to pick up English from scratch.
This deplorable state of affairs has a long history. The British Deaf
Association was set up 100 years ago in response to two events of astounding
arrogance on the part of the hearing world. In 1880 in Milan, an international
congress of hearing educators of deaf children voted to ban the use of sign
languages in education throughout the world. In 1889, a Royal Commission
ruled that British deaf children should only be taught to try to learn to
speak 鈥 the 鈥榦ral-only鈥 method.
For prelingually deaf children 鈥 those who are deaf at birth or became
so before they learn to speak 鈥 the 鈥榦ral/aural鈥 approach is daunting. Because
such children cannot monitor by ear the sounds they make, they have to learn
鈥榯o monitor it by other senses 鈥 by vision, touch, vibration-sense, and
kinesthesia鈥, as the American neurologist Oliver Sacks describes in his
recent book Seeing Voices.
But trying to learn to speak is arduous for an additional reason, says
Sacks. 鈥楾he prelingually deaf have no auditory image, no idea what speech
actually sounds like, no idea of a sound-meaning correspondence,鈥 Sacks
argues. 鈥業t is this which poses great difficulties, and which may require
thousands of hours of individual tuition to achieve.鈥 It is for this reason,
he says, that 鈥榯he voices of the pre- and postlingually deaf are usually
quite different, and distinguishable at once; the postlingually deaf remember
how to speak, even though they can no longer readily monitor their speech;
the prelingually deaf must be taught to speak, without any sense or memory
of how it sounds.鈥
Lip-reading is nearly as unsatisfactory. It is not easy at the best
of times, and requires great concentration. It also relies on an extensive
knowledge of English 鈥 so contrary to myth, hearing people make better lip-readers
than do the deaf.
The legacy of a century of such misguided attempts to 鈥榠ntegrate鈥 the
deaf into the hearing world is that deaf people now leave school with an
average reading age of less than nine. Books and even the subtitles on television
or films are beyond the grasp of many. Moreover, deaf adolescents and young
adults are usually socially isolated even within their own families. At
work, most deaf people are underemployed, and have little chance of promotion.
鈥業t is almost impossible for hearing people to imagine their experience,鈥
says Elizabeth Wincott, the chief executive of the BDA. 鈥楳any deaf people
are effectively disenfranchised from many aspects of life that we take for
驳谤补苍迟别诲.鈥
The rare 鈥榮uccess stories鈥 show what should be the norm 鈥 and why it
is not. Growing up in the US, Will Madsen explains: 鈥業 was the only deaf
child in the school. I could never be a part of a group or join in a family
discussion, because of having to concentrate on one person at a time. I
got by because I had learned to read and write.鈥 When he finally went to
a school for the deaf, at the age of 14, Madsen recalls that his life altered
dramatically: 鈥業 learned sign language and it changed my whole life.鈥 Throughout
the world, residential schools for the deaf have been the stronghold of
sign languages, despite official bans, because the schools were the only
places where most deaf children could meet other signers.
Madsen is now a professor at Gallaudet University in Washington DC 鈥
the world鈥檚 only liberal arts university for deaf people. There, everything
from business management and computing to philosophy and physics is taught
in sign. Hearing students and lecturers must learn sign too: 鈥楽tudents complain
when they have teachers who can鈥檛 sign very well and they are right to do
so,鈥 Madsen says. In 1987, students rebelled against the appointment of
a hearing, non-signing president, and won. For the first time since it was
founded in 1864, Gallaudet University has a deaf president.
Clark Denmark escaped social isolation and linguistic deprivation by
being born of deaf parents. He travelled to the US to study at Gallaudet
University and then specialised in computing. After 10 years, Denmark felt
鈥榠t wasn鈥檛 what I wanted to do鈥 and left computing to take up a post in
the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Durham.
There he established a course to train deaf people who wished to become
tutors in BSL. He now finds teaching about BSL very rewarding. But he too
met early discouragement. 鈥楢t my school in Glasgow, sign language was not
officially accepted,鈥 he explains. 鈥極ralism was supposed to be strictly
enforced.鈥 But sign language survived underground, and thanks to his parents
Denmark was already fluent: 鈥榃e signed outside the classroom and were bilingual
despite the teachers.鈥
The turning point, the start of a growing trend to accord sign its proper
status, came in the 1960s when an American linguist, William Stokoe, published
his studies of American Sign Language. His work revealed the structural
richness of ASL; he showed, for instance, that even subtle distinctions
鈥 such as the difference between 鈥榤y brother is late鈥 and 鈥榤y brother tends
to be late鈥 鈥 are easily conveyed in sign languages. Since then, neuropsychologists,
too, have discovered these languages, and have found remarkable parallels
in the way the brain processes signed and spoken language. For instance,
the left side of the brain, which processes spoken and written languages,
also deals with sign languages, even though other, nonsymbolic, visual tasks
are handled by the brain鈥檚 right hemisphere. Howard Poizner, Edward Klima
and Ursula Bellugi, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the
University of California at San Diego, discovered this remarkable parallel
between spoken and sign languages by studying fluent ASL-users who have
had strokes. Those with damage to the left side of the brain showed impairments
in sign language, but they remained able to process nonlanguage visuospatial
relations. Those with damage to the right hemisphere showed the reverse
pattern.
Research at the University of Bristol has also shown that deaf children
born to deaf parents develop language using BSL just as hearing children
learn to speak. Such children start using genuine signs between 16 and 20
months, much as hearing children begin to say things. By the ages of three
and four, 鈥榙eaf children in deaf families are producing fluent communication
indicating sophisticated thinking,鈥 says Jim Kyle at Bristol. He and his
colleagues found that deaf children from deaf families 鈥榟ad mastered and
were using a great deal of BSL by the age of three or four years and functioned
as effectively linguistically as hearing children in spoken language鈥. Four-year-old
Ginny, for instance, was able to carry on an imaginary conversation about
鈥榞reen custard鈥 in front of her mother.
鈥榃e now see very strong arguments for a bilingual approach,鈥 Kyle says.
Once deaf children are fluent in BSL they are then in a position to learn
written English as a second language. At the moment, no one yet knows how
best to exploit a child鈥檚 knowledge of BSL to teach English, because no
studies have been done, and there is an urgent need for research in this
area.
But in many cases, the problems start earlier. Most deaf infants 鈥 19
out of 20 鈥 are born to hearing parents, as deafness is rarely inherited.
So most deaf infants are denied the opportunity to learn BSL and so cannot
acquire a genuine, complex language when their developing brains are most
receptive to it. The tragedy is that the later children learn their first
language, the less fluent they will ever become in any. Psycholinguists
draw parallels with 鈥榝eral鈥 or 鈥榳ild鈥 hearing children who have grown up
isolated from other people. 鈥業f you have no first language it is difficult
to master one in late childhood or adolescence,鈥 says Bencie Woll, a linguist
in the Centre for Deaf Studies at the University of Bristol.
Feeding brains hungry for language
So the trouble for most deaf children is not that they are deaf, but
that they have hearing parents who do not know sign language. Unfortunately,
it takes years for a hearing adult to learn BSL from scratch. Even after
studying BSL for 12 years, Woll says that in conversation with a deaf person
she can 鈥榩ass鈥 as a native signer only for about 10 minutes 鈥 eventually,
like a non-native speaker of a spoken language, she makes a mistake that
no native signer would. But parents do not need to pass as 鈥榥ative鈥 signers,
they need to be able to grow with their children in signing skills. Other
adults, deaf and fluent in BSL, could serve as consultants to the family
and models for both children and parents.
Studies at Bristol have revealed further complexities awaiting a hearing
parent who attempts to interact with a deaf child. The researchers have
found that hearing and deaf parents gain a child鈥檚 attention and direct
its learning in strikingly different ways. 鈥榃hen we asked mothers to get
their babies to look at something in the room, hearing mothers point and
talk at the same time, without first trying to get the child to attend to
them,鈥 says Woll. In contrast, deaf mothers with a hering or deaf child
nevery try to communicate unless they have first gained the child鈥檚 attention.
鈥楾hey then tell the child in sign what it will see when it looks over there,
and then point to the object,鈥 she says.
Deaf mothers regard the first year of a child鈥檚 life as the time for
training attention. By the end of the first year, mother and child will
have well-coordinated patterns of gaze. 鈥楧eaf children of hearing mothers
have not learnt to do this, and so can鈥檛 follow conversations,鈥 says Woll.
Furthermore, she says, 鈥楧eaf mothers exploit the visual modality much better
than do hearing ones. They alter signs to make them more visible, manipulate
the child鈥檚 hand to help it to form signs, and have ways of playing with
vision and action. Hearing people just don鈥檛 do this.鈥
So deaf children clearly need to interact with deaf adults as early
as possible. Similarly, hearing parents also need help early: Scandinavian
studies show that parents can learn enough sign to help their child if they
begin to study the language in the child鈥檚 infancy. One approach might be
a network of peripatetic sign teachers who visit families with a deaf child
regularly. The BBC鈥檚 Children in Need appeal has just funded such a scheme
in the Bristol area, to give children an adult model who is fluent in sign
and give parents practice in signing. But the task is far too big for overstretched
charities to tackle alone.
A major stumbling block in Britain is that the government provides few
resources for research into BSL, for training teachers, or for training
BSL/English interpreters. Britain鈥檚 major research centre on sign language
and deaf studies, at the University of Bristol, exists entirely on 鈥榮oft鈥
money. After 12 years of research, and after training more than 1,000 people
in BSL, the deaf members of the Bristol centre are no more secure in their
work than when they began. There is not one permanently funded linguist
studying BSL in the country.
Similarly, a pioneering unit based at the University of Durham 鈥 the
Deaf Studies Research Unit 鈥 survives on a financial knife edge, with funds
mostly from the British Deaf Association, the European Social Fund and the
Leverhulme Trust. With financial support from the Department of Employment
and the DSS, the BDA has sponsored two deaf tutors at the unit. Since the
end of 1985, these tutors have trained 180 deaf people as teachers of BSL.
鈥楩or most, it was the first time they have been able to communicate and
learn in an educational setting in BSL, the language that is easiest for
them,鈥 explains Denmark. 鈥榃e have seen incredible changes in these people;
many have got better jobs or promotions after the course, for instance.鈥
Government funds for this project end this year.
A campaign the British Deaf Association ran four years ago won the right
to communication support for young deaf people in Youth Training Schemes,
which has since been extended to deaf adults in Employment Training. 鈥楤ut
unless funds are forthcoming to train an increasing number of communicators
and interpreters, thousands of deaf people will be unable to benefit from
training,鈥 says Bob Peckford, director of advocacy services at the BDA.
Liz Scott Gibson, director of sign services at the BDA, is one of only
90 registered BSL-English interpreters. The hearing child of deaf parents,
she is highly skilled in both languages, and it was through the good offices
that I conferred with Madsen and Denmark, in long and animated interviews
over the telephone. But interpreters are in short supply in Britian because
few can afford to undergo the long training required with no guarantee of
a regular income at the end of it all. This is not the case in many other
European countries, because governments subsidise interpreter services.
The Dutch government, for instance, provides each deaf person with the funds
to hire an interpreter for 250 hours a year, making it possible to consult
solicitors, doctors and organise meetings at work. Support for deaf people
is also strong in Denmark, where ubiquitous 鈥榤inicoms鈥 linked to telephone
provide visual telecommunications.
Sweden has turned to legislation to ensure that its deaf children have
access to sign language. After officially recognising Swedish Sign Language
in 1981, (something the British government has yet to do), it last year
passed a law requiring all teachers of deaf children to be fluent in sign
language. Teachers have five years to learn it, or be dismissed.
In Britain鈥檚 schools, there is still much resistance to teaching deaf
children through BSL. The most striking exception in 鈥榤ainstream鈥 schools
comes from the local education authority in Leeds. Under the directorship
of Miranda Pickersgill, in charge of hearing impaired services, Leeds is
pioneering the bilingual approach. It provides several tiers of support
to deaf children in the classroom: deaf adults (native BSL-users), hearing
support teachers (who are acquiring proficiency in BSL), and hearing educational
interpreters (who also are becoming proficient in BSL). By attending specially
鈥榬esourced鈥 schools still in the mainstream, 鈥榙eaf children have access
to the curriculum of the school and also to deaf culture and sign language,鈥
says Pickersgill.
The Leeds initiative has wider implications too. 鈥業t is also a chance
to change society鈥檚 attitudes: the hearing children have a chance to rub
shoulders with deaf children, and so they will be different from you and
I who never met a deaf child when we were young.鈥 Yet the Leeds project
is under pressure. 鈥楳oney is very tight and we are a very expensive service.鈥
Things are particularly difficult because the 1988 Education Reform Act
did not recognise BSL within the new National Curriculum, despite that fact
that two years ago the European Parliament gave official recognition to
the sign languages of Europe.
Such changes are all 鈥榲ery ad hoc,鈥 says Scott Gibson. 鈥楾hese initiatives
are very dependent on lacoal personalities. There is no lead from the top,
no direction, not even any funding.鈥 There is an urgent need for in-depth
study of various teaching methods, she says. 鈥楾he government鈥檚 response
is that 鈥榳e leave educational policy up to each individual area.鈥
The BDA has achieved small victories in the provision of sign interpreters
in the public arena, which help to make sign language more visible to the
general public and bring deaf people into the mainstream. The National Theatre
in London, for instance, now puts on one signed performance per season,
and the political parties now provide interpreters at their annual party
conferences. On TV, the BBC airs its weekly programme for the deaf, See
Hear, and Channel 4 provides an inset of a BSL interpreter on its morning
news at 9 am. On 30 October, designated 鈥楧eaf Day鈥, Channel 4 will sign
or subtitle programmes throughout the day.
But such initiatives are still piecemeal. The drafters of the Broadcasting
Bill threw out a clause that would have guaranteed that a certain percentage
of airtime carried interpreted programming, settling instead for subtitles
that are incomprehensible to many deaf people with poor reading skills.
Nonetheless, deaf people are increasingly fighting back in support of their
language and their culture. 鈥楧eaf people are speaking out, and many hearing
people are supporting them,鈥 says Pickersgill.
Research into sign language, fascinating in its own right, also has
much to tell the hearing world. As Sacks writes: 鈥楾he study of the deaf
shows us that much of what is distinctively human in us 鈥 our capacities
for language, for thought, for communication and culture 鈥 do not develop
automatically in us, are not just biological functions, but are, equally,
social and historial in origin: that they are a gift 鈥 the most wonderful
of gifts 鈥 from one generation to another.
* * *
The signs of a living language
Each sign language is a 鈥榲isual, physical language that has a different
approach to expressing ideas,鈥 explains Will Madsen. In sign language you
state the topic, and then verbs, adverbs and adjectives follow. Just as
words consist of a range of vowels and consonants, combined in specific
ways within each language, signs consist of arrangements of handshape, as
well as the hands鈥 location, orientation and movement, Clark Denmark states.
A basic sign for 鈥榮ee鈥 for instance, can be inflected in some 500 ways to
mean everything from 鈥榞lance鈥 to 鈥榣eer鈥 by changes in the speed of the hand
movement, say, or in facial expression. Inflection denoting a question,
for instance, comes from movements of the eyes and eyebrows.
So British Sign Language is not the spelling of English words through
the manual alphabet that many people learned as children in the Scouts or
Guides. Signers do sometimes use fingerspelling for proper names or technical
terms, but most signs do come from English words nor can they be readily
translated in a one-to-one fashion.
Moreover. sign is not only a language of the hands, but of space, with
signs defined in relation to the signer鈥檚 body. 鈥楽igners don鈥檛 look at each
other鈥檚 hands but at their faces,鈥 says Bencie Woll. 鈥榃hat is important
is where the hands were and where they are going,鈥 she says.
Hearing people tend to think of language as linear, with one word following
another in two dimensions. 鈥楤ut BSL uses space to create grammar,鈥 say Woll.
In sign, things or ideas can exist simultaneously in space. For instance,
instead of using pronouns to talk about people, you assign imaginery locations
to people. 鈥滺e鈥 and 鈥榮he鈥 exist in space the rest occurs between these
two cognitive points,鈥 say Woll.
It is very abstract in a way,鈥 say Woll. 鈥楬earing people sometime use
space to talk about time 鈥 before and after, say 鈥 but that鈥檚 occurring
all the time in BSL.鈥
Hundreds of different sign languages have evolved around the world,
each with many unique signs, and with differences in grammar and syntax.
But linguists suspect that sign languages may be more similar in grammar
than present-day conventional languages. This could be because sign languages
have appeared more recently than languages with a written form; they may
evolve and then disappear more readily as particular deaf communities wax
and wane. 鈥楽o sign languages could be closer to that elusive universal language
much debated by linguists,鈥 says Woll. An underlying similarity in grammar
could also explain why deaf people from different countries are far better
than hearing people at communicating with one another. At Bristol, Woll
and her colleagues have begun to try to analyse how deaf people manage to
do this so well.
Most sign languages also have dialects, just as English does. ASL is
an exception 鈥 it is remarkably standard across the US and Canada, as a
result of the huge influence of Gallaudet University. But even ASL dialects,
between blacks and whites, for instance. BSL shows even more regional variation,
perhaps because Britain鈥檚 deaf communities had no central focus of higher
education, or perhaps because BSL is an older language. In Britain, dialects,
with different signs particularly for colours and numbers, developed from
the big residential schools around the country, explains Denmark. 鈥楩or instance,
my wife and I went to different schools in Glasgow and have different signs
for some things. But we enjoy the difference and understand each other very
飞别濒濒.鈥
鈥楾here are rich, colourful variations in sign,鈥 Denmark states. So far,
BSL has no standardised form such as 鈥榬eceived pronunciation鈥 of the BBC.
But the introduction of signing on television news may lead to growing standardisation,
Woll suspects. 鈥楾he teaching of the Durham unit may also become as influential
as Eton, Oxford and Cambridge are to spoken English,鈥 Denmark predicts.
A dictionary soon to be published may also make its mark. With funding
from the BDA, the Deaf Studies Research Unit in the Department of Sociology
and Social Policy at the University of Durham has been working on the first
BSL/English Dictionary. It won鈥檛 teach you BSL, any more than you can learn
French by studying a dictionary, but it should be a useful reference book.
Hearing users need to keep in mind that BSL is not a visual form of
English, but an independent language with its own grammar, syntax and vocabulary.
Words that happen to sound the same but have different meanings in English
鈥 for instance, 鈥榖ack鈥 as part of the body versus 鈥榖ack鈥 as in 鈥榞o back
home鈥, do not happen to share the same sign in BSL.
David Brien of the University of Durham, who is editor of the dictionary,
says it is the first attempt to produce a bilingual dictionary in Britain.
It will contain more than 1,800 signs. And because it is genuinely bilingual,
it should be useful to both deaf people learning English as a second language
and hearing people learing BSL. The new dictionary has clear sentence definitions
in English, which are much more 鈥榰ser friendly鈥 than the usual truncated
form.
The Dictionary of British Sign Language/English compiled for the British
Deaf Association by the Deaf Studies Research Unit, University of Durham,
will be published by Faber and Faber later this year.