The Once New Field: Sign Language Research, or Breaking Sod in the Back Forty

THE ONCE NEW FIELD: SIGN LANGUAGE RESEARCH, OR BREAKING SOD IN THE BACK FORTY: William C. Stokoe Sign languages of deaf people became my field of study in ways I only partly understand. One may have been the irresistible challenge that it was not a field of study in 1955, the year I arrived at Gallaudet College (now a University) with no experience of interacting with deaf people. There the Dean of Women, the late Elizabeth Benson, taught us newly recruited faculty members first to fingerspell words. After that she showed us how to make signs. But she made it very clear that these were only means to make visible the proper academic speech we were all expected to use (and which some of the students were thought to be able to lipread). She taught us handshapes and movements to represent each letter of the alphabet, and other handshapes and movements, called "signs," to represent whole words. All the emphasis was placed on correct usage, good English: we had to be proper models for the students. She (like everyone else at that time) insisted that the "language of signs" was not a language at all; we must use the manual alphabet and signs she taught us to make what we said visible. Even students who were born deaf and whose native and primary language was Sign would later tell me: "ENGLISH REAL LANGUAGE; SIGN BROKEN LANGUAGE." @ 1997 Linstok Press 379 ISSN 0302-1475 Stokoe These lessons in "manual communication," the name many educators use for this kind of activity, lasted for only about two weeks. Away from them, in my classes and tutorials and around campus, I was impressed by the fluency and intelligence of my deaf students and my deaf colleagues on the faculty. They were making some of the signs our teacher labeled "slang" and forbade us to use, and they were using these signs with an efficiency and grace that made my halting attempts to represent what I was trying to say look ludicrous. So it was with a rebellious attitude that I began to get more and more interested in the ways that these deaf people carried on their encounters with each other-and in the subtle and not so subtle ways in which they could change their way of signing when they were interacting only with each other or with hearing people present. It was not just our sign teacher1 who insisted that signing as a way to express language was totally inferior to speech. Almost all our veteran hearing colleagues subscribed to that view. They held an 1 I would be doing Miss Benson's memory injustice if I did not add that what she taught us was left over from the old official line, the philosophy of the Gallaudet "Normal Program." However, as an interpreter and teacher of professionals who worked with deaf people outside of the ivied academic walls, "Benny" left that nonsense behind. She taught us to ignore the facial and other nonmanual activity we observed in students' signing and to speak and sign straight English; but I heard Benny telling medical personnel who encounter deaf people in their professional work that in the matter of facial expression they should, "Do what comes naturally." Like many others, she had an exaggerated and mistaken idea of what a college education was all about, but she was a terrific person, interpreter, and signer. SLS 93 380 Winter 1996 even more extreme view; they thought signing was outright harmful. A leader among them, who held one of the two doctoral degrees at the College before 1953, had left the field of his graduate study, history and government, to teach English to students he referred to in conspiratorial tones as "the deef." Perhaps most uninhibited and unsophisticated among them, though, was the college nurse. At our first meeting she assured me that I would soon learn to enjoy working with deaf students, because although they were defective in speech and lacked the ability to reason, she said, "They are like dogs and nigrahs; they're quick to sense what you want of them." That kind of unreconstructed mind set was certainly one of the impulses...