The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (3 page)

Competence in American Sign Language is at the core of Deaf identity in the United States.3 Can a human language really use vision to perceive grammatical messages and body movements to produce them? Yes indeed, and that is one of the most important discoveries in linguistics and neuroscience of the last century: language is a capacity of the brain; if one channel is blocked, language will be expressed in another.4 The words of ASL are signs; like the words of oral languages, they are constructed from a small set of building blocks; not consonants and vowels, to be sure, but movements, handshapes and orientations, and bodily locations. In ASL, the basic signs undergo regular changes to convey part of speech, derivation, compounding, and more. As do spoken languages, ASL has rules for agreement-for example, using space to convey subject and object or source and goal. It has rules for modifying the movement of signs to convey adverbial ideas, such as repeated, habitual, and continuous actions. It has a rich system of pronouns that can be incorporated into the verb. The basic word order in ASL sentences is Subject-Verb-Object, but there are rules that change the basic order-for example, the topic of the sentence may move to the beginning of the sentence. In ASL, body shifts and facial expressions convey sentence structure and discourse structure.

As linguist Ben BahanD points out, the eyes play a role in sending as well as receiving messages in ASL.5 Eye movements may occur on a single word to convey a meaning, or they may mark noun phrases and verb phrases, or a glance may refer to an actor previously located in space. Eye movements play a role in storytelling and in taking turns in conversation. The ASL signer's eyes may leave the audience briefly to accomplish some of these functions but they soon return to verify that the audience is following the visual narration. It may not be surprising then that there is extensive research evidence showing that fluent ASL signers have heightened perception in the visual periphery, heightened abilities in spatial processing, and enhanced capacity for interpreting rapidly presented visual information.6 Deaf people are indeed, "The People of the Eye."

As do virtually all languages, ASL has regional dialects, registers that range from intimate to highly formal, and art forms like narrative and humor, discussed below. There is no universal sign language; ASL, for example, is unrelated to British Sign Language. Signed languages such as ASL are full-fledged languages structurally independent from the spoken languages with which they coexist. Generally speaking, the later ASL is learned the less its mastery.? If ASL is not a person's primary language, that is likely to be evident very quickly (as with any language). It may be revealed as soon as the newcomer is introduced to a Deaf person. Such introductions tend to follow a pattern. The person making the introduction (let's say, the hostess) positions herself at the vertex of a triangle, turns partly toward Alex and introduces Bill to him. Using the manual alphabet, with a handshape for each letter, she fingerspells Bill's first and last names, and then gives Bill's name sign. (A name sign either refers to a salient feature-for example, a big nose or a scar-or incorporates the fingerspelled first letter of the person's first or last name.) The hostess states where Bill is from (the location often refers to that of the Deaf school) and may well mention Bill's work and contacts in the Deaf-World; if Bill is hearing, she mentions that, too. In corresponding fashion, she then introduces Alex to Bill.8 Finding shared friends and acquaintances in this way is important to Deaf people, linguist Carol PaddenD explains. It is a way of maintaining ties with the dispersed members of the Deaf-World and hence a way of enhancing group cohesion. If newcomers do not know the custom-or if they make errors in grammar, pronunciation, or social appropriateness, then they are revealed.9 According to PaddenD, membership in the ASL minority entails, in part, using the language and showing respect for it. Also expected are adherence to social ties, and a fondness for storytelling. As ASL is an unwritten language, face-to-face use of the language is the main way to transmit the culture.10

Sociolinguist Barbara KannapellD, has written of ASL: "It is our language in every sense of the word. We create it, we keep it alive, and it keeps us and our traditions alive."" And further, "To reject ASL is to reject the Deaf person.."12 We recognize such evident pride in one's language and the wish to protect it. In France, to take one example, the French Academy (and legislature) have labored for centuries to protect the purity of French from the inroads of other languages. Speakers of several minority languages in France-Breton, Alsatian, and Arabic among them-battle for acceptance of their language and distinct ethnic identity. Closer to home, Native Americans have long struggled for the protection of their languages, and identities; in 1990 Congress enacted a law encouraging the use of Native American languages in the instruction of Native American children.13

Language is, then, symbolic of the ethnic group and a powerful force in sustaining ethnicity, but it also has an important pragmatic role in allowing everyday communication. We are all most comfortable, most clear, and most expressive in our primary language. "What makes Deaf people feel at ease when communicating with each other?" KannapellD asks rhetorically. And she answers: "Deaf people can understand each other 100 percent of the time [in ASL], whereas outside of the Deaf community they get fragmentary information or one-way communication." She goes on to explain that ASL comes easily and naturally to most Deaf people and allows Deaf people to share meanings, that is, "common experiences, cultural beliefs, and values."14

A further feature of many minority languages is their struggle for survival. The national language has prestige, it is used in government and other formal situations, while the minority language is used primarily within the ethnic group.15 In such a situation, the minority language takes on some of the properties of the prestige language, borrowing vocabulary and syntax. The prestige language may even replace the vernacular in all contexts, including ethnic life (home, community, worship)-as it has done with many immigrant groups in the United States. To accomplish this subjugation and replacement of the minority language, the dominant ethnic group can require its own language by law, use it and no other in the schools, punish children who use the "vernacular," and reward minority leaders who promote the majority language. In a different resolution of the struggle between the prestige and vernacular languages, both are maintained but speakers of the nondominant language are led to believe that theirs is a substandard dialect of the dominant language, a vernacular that should not be employed for serious purposes such as education and government. Language policy in Spain provided examples of both strategies until recently.

Sociolinguist Heinz Kloss, an international authority on minority languages, contrasted the cases of Basque and Catalan:

So the Spanish government, in trying to establish and maintain the monopoly of Castilian Spanish, must try to blot out the Basque language completely, for there is no possibility that the Basques will ever lose consciousness of the fact that their language is unrelated to Spanish. The position of Catalan is quite different, because both Catalan and Spanish are Romance Languages. There is a chance that speakers of Catalan can be induced to consider their mother tongue as a vernacular, with Castilian as its natural standard language.16

When Catalonia became an autonomous region, its leaders felt a sacred duty to restore wide use of their language, which many of its speakers had considered a substandard dialect of Spanish.'?

ASL has similarly been targeted, in different eras, for recasting as a variety of English or for outright replacement by English. The American initiative that started in the nineteenth century was modeled on one in France in the eighteenth century. It all began when the abbe de l'Epee founded in Paris what was to be the first enduring school for the Deaf. With the aid of his pupils, Epee chose or invented signs for all the word endings in French, and for all the articles, prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and so on. This vocabulary was signed in the order of the original French, so that there was a means of expressing virtually any French sentence. This Signed French was disseminated by Epee's disciples who created schools for the Deaf throughout Europe and the United States. When Epee died in 1789, the new French republic nationalized his school.

Laurent C1ercD, an eminent student and then teacher at the French national school came to the United States in 1816 to co-found the first enduring school for the Deaf in America. He brought Signed French with him and adapted it to English.18 However, attempts to bastardize the language of the French Deaf-World (LSF-la Langue des Signes Francaise) with spoken French and, later, to bastardize ASL with spoken English were largely abandoned by the mid-nineteenth century; they violated too many principles of visual language to be intelligible and were rejected by many Deaf teachers and Deaf leaders who preferred their minority language to Signed French or Signed English.19 Even the simplest sentence in Signed French took on enormous complexity. One example, a line from Racine, "To the smallest of the birds, He gives their crumbs," required forty-eight signs; gives alone required five signs: those for verb, present, third person, singular, and "give." To the Deaf pupil, the string of signs in Signed French lacked unity, was full of distractions, was far too long for a single unit of meaning and, in the end, was unintelligible.

The efforts to recast LSF to conform to French and to recast ASL to conform to English failed: pupils used their own sign language most of the time. Despite that failure, this policy had resurgence in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with two consequences. First, a new variety of ASL developed among the Deaf, a variety used by the college-educated elite, which incorporated English word order and parts of English grammar. This new hybrid became the prestige language while "grassroots" Deaf continued to use the unrevised ASL.20 Second, inside the classroom, many teachers used Signed English or, most often and more simply, they spoke English while accompanying some of the spoken words with uninflected signs from ASL-that is, without the modifications of signs to convey subject and object, part of speech, derivation, agreement, manner, and so on.

So much for recasting ASL as a variety of English. When it comes to outright replacement of the minority language, the schools are an important venue. ASL joins many other minority languages as a target of replacement policies imposed in the schools 21 For example, during the period between the two world wars, successor states to the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires vigorously pursued language replacement using the schools. Likewise, the schools were the locus for imposing spoken French on Deaf students in France and spoken English on Deaf students in the United States. The first systematic efforts in the United States to replace ASL with English occurred in late nineteenth century, at a time when many Anglo-Americans feared that the proliferation of ethnic groups and languages might overwhelm their existing institutions; the drive was on for restricted immigration of non-Anglos and for assimilation of those already in the country. In the United States, hearing and Deaf professors who taught in the residential schools using ASL resisted replacement at first, advocating bilingual goals, but ultimately the language of the Deaf classroom became spoken English and its mastery the central purpose of Deaf schooling.

The late nineteenth century was also a period of ethnic intolerance in Italy, which was undergoing national unification (the Risorgimento). In Milan, hearing educators of the Deaf convened an International Congress on the Education of the Deaf to which Deaf teachers were not invited; of the 164 delegates only five were Deaf. The carefully orchestrated congress voted to replace all sign languages with spoken ones, and consequently all Deaf teachers with hearing ones. Sign languages were not to be tolerated under any circumstance. Older students were quarantined in some schools in the hope that younger students would not learn sign language from them.

Sign language replacement had a wealthy, prestigious, and monomaniacal advocate in Alexander Graham Bell. In an address to the National Education Association, Bell maintained, like some of today's English-only advocates, that the very future of the nation required eradicating minority languages.22 Bell wrote: "It is important for the preservation of our national existence that people of this country should speak one tongue."23 By 1920, four-fifths of all Deaf students were taught spoken English using spoken English itself, which they could not hear, while the rest of their education fell by the wayside.24

The Deaf-World at this time so feared for the demise of its sign language that it commissioned a series of films by eminent Deaf orators in order to preserve a record of the language.25 And so matters largely stood until the ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s in America, when a tidal wave of ethnic reaffirmation led to a resurgence of minority languages, including ASL. So much for replacing ASL with English. (We tell about the ethnic revival and the Deaf-World in the section on History below.)

All of the different functions of language-expressing individual and cultural identity, purveying cultural norms and values, linking the present and the past-sustain an ethnic group's love of its native language as the central symbol of its identity and fuel the minority's resistance to replacement of its language by more powerful others.

BONDING TO ONE'S KIND

Members of ethnic groups commonly have strong emotional ties to their kind.26 Loyalty to their ethnic group may even at times lead them to act against their own personal interests. What are the wellsprings of such commitment, which is exceeded only by family loyalty? Sigmund Freud told a Zionist society in 1926: "What bound me to Jewry was ... neither faith nor national pride [but] many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words ... [and also] a clear consciousness of inner identity. . ."27 Social psychologist Henri Tajfel has shown that the perception of belonging to a group creates solidarity with that group and devaluing of other groups-in a word ethnocentrism. His explanation: our self-image is comprised of a personal identity and many social identities-as many as the groups to which we belong. We aim to achieve and maintain a positive self-image, so we are loyal to the groups of which we are a member; we are disposed to think well of them and less well of others.28 There is no in-group without an out-group, so it has been suggested that ethnic loyalty requires an opposing group.29 Some writers have contended that ethnocentrism is all the greater nowadays as men and women seek meaningful affiliations to cope with the homogenization and bureaucratization of society and the breakup of traditional authority.30