Having My Say

The REAL Sign Language

When I went deaf 40 years ago and learned sign language, I was quickly told that the sign language that I learned was fake, and that I was polluting the real ASL. This came from The Deaf Community (capital D). more on that later. This will take a little explaining, so bear with me.

There are two distinct groups of deaf people in the U.S. The one group of the deaf are called late-deafened. Those are people who went deaf later in life. They make up about 80% of the total deaf. A big majority of this group are seldom around others who are deaf and therefore never learn to sign. Those who do learn sign language most often learn “Signed English” as I did.

Another group are pre-lingual, that is they went deaf before they were able to acquire a spoken language. About 90% of this population are born from hearing parents and at least in the last three decades often have cochlear implants to allowed many of them to join the hearing world.

Of the total deaf population it is estimated that about 3% are self proclaimed members of the “Deaf Community” (with a capital D).

Getting back to the idea of fake sign language. It was one from the Deaf Community that told me that learning to sign in English pollutes true ASL that they use. ASL is very different from the English language. ASL uses a topic-comment structure, visual space, and facial expressions for grammar. Signed English follows strict English sentence structure.

 
Finally, getting back to the main purpose of this post, after my “talk” with the Deaf Community person about his belief that Signed English is fake, it dawned on me that ASL itself is by no means the first sign language used in America. In fact, sign language has been around for a thousand years or more before ASL came to America’s shores. A big part of original American Sign Language users were from the Navajo population, but there were about 40 over versions in the true Native-American population.

So, maybe my version of sign language is a fake version of ASL, but ASL is certainly a fake sign language compared to the original version of signing in Native America.

4 thoughts on “The REAL Sign Language”

  1. Interesting. In New Zealand there was a time when the use of sign language was punished and children were expected to learn to use signed English, lip reading and to learn to speak even though they couldn’t hear their own voices. Nevertheless they secretly developed their own sign language to communicate amongst themselves. Eventually commonsense prevailed and children were allowed to sign freely and the language they had evolved was standardised as NZSL (New Zealand Sign Language). It is now one of our official languages, the other being Te Reo Māori. English is the de facto language but not official. NZ was the first nation to make a sign language an official language. I don’t know how many nations, if any, have followed suit.

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    1. Thanks again Barry for your usual valuable info. I can’t imagine someone who has never heard a human voice being able to learn to speak, but that is what Alexander Graham Bells schools for the deaf did. It would have been exhausting to accomplish that. Now with all the AI stuff happening and that includes speech-to-text apps, and also cochlear implants, I suspect that sign language is for the most part dissappear within the next few years. It is much easier being deaf now than it was 40 years ago for me.

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      1. Ah, yes, I think what deaf children were taught here was known as the Alexander Graham Bell method. Fortunately, it hasn’t been taught for a long time. On the other hand, NZSL is being taught to non-signers – as language in its own right, and this is especially true since NZSL became an official language in 2006. And learning any language also requires learning the culture where it is used, as language and culture are closely connected. That’s true for sign languages just as it is with spoken languages.

        Personally, I don’t see AI replacing sign language. Instead I can see its place as a translation tool in much the same way as it can be used to aid communication between a native Japanese speaker and a native Māori speaker, but not as a communication tool between two speakers (or signers) of the same language. The other role AI can perform is in the learning of sign language for non-native signers – just as it can be a useful teaching tool for any language.

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        1. Yeah, I agree that sign language will continue to be used in the Deaf Community for as long as the Deaf community exists. I was speaking of the communications between a deaf person and the other 98% of the population. When I went deaf 40 years ago talking with a that 98% was difficult if not impossible, but I chose to stay in the hearing world and was seldom around other deaf people. I really haven’t signed at all since my wife died 5 years ago. I am now in a retirement community with 200 other people and when someone wants to talk with me all I do is to turn on my “ears” on my smartphone.

          When I said sign language will disappear, it is because the deaf population is shrinking every day now. My deafness is associated with an inoperative cochlea so implants don’t currently work for me, but I see the time when they will eventually bypass the cochlea.

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