Sign Language Diglossia in a British Deaf Community

SLS 17 (1977), 347-356 Q William C. Stokoe SIGN LANGUAGE DIGLOSSIA IN A BRITISH DEAF COMMUNITY Margaret Deuchar Sign languages used by the deaf have only recently become subject to serious investigation by linguists. Much of the work so far published has been on American Sign Language, its structure, its use in deaf communities, and its acquisition by children as well as by the famous chimpanzee Washoe. There seem to have been no comparable studies of British Sign Language, and my own research is an attempt to initiate exploration of this language. By British Sign Language I mean the manual system used by many deaf people in Britain as their primary mode of communication . According to an estimate of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, there are about 909,000 deaf people in Great Britain; and though there are no statistics on sign language use, it would not be unreasonable to assume that the majority of deaf people have some degree of competence in Sign. As a system, British Sign consists of a combination of manual signs, its vocabulary, which represent concepts or ideas and may be compared to words in spoken languages, and fingerspelling, a two-hand employing symbolism which enables English words to be represented visibly. Deaf children acquire the system A version of this paper was read at the Spring Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, 29-31 March 1977 in Walsall, Staffordshire. Sign Language Studies 16 either from their parents if they are deaf too, or more often, as most deaf children have hearing parents, from their peers at school. Signing is not usually encouraged in schools for the deaf, and is rarely used by teachers, who see their task as teaching lipreading and speech; but it is used, if surreptitiously , by deaf children to communicate among themselves. It is also used more openly by deaf adults at social centers for the deaf. These are usually run by voluntary welfare organizations or local authorities not connected with the schools. Among deaf adults there are at least two varieties of Sign in use, apparently relating to different situations or functions. The existence of these two varieties was noted by an experienced worker with the deaf, Firth, who writes ... we have two languages, one the pure deaf sign language, based on the spontaneous mode of expression of deaf people, but using as vocabulary a body of gestures which have become known over the years to generations of the deaf. Secondly we have another language of gesture, also based on this accepted vocabulary of conventional deaf signs, but which uses them in relation to grammatical English by using together spoken words, lipreading, and the fingerspelling alphabet (Firth 1966: 126f). Other workers with the deaf also recognize these two varieties and refer to them with labels such as "deaf and dumb signing" versus "grammatical signing". Further evidence for their existence is found in the fact that trainee social workers with the deaf in Britain have to pass an examination in signing showing competence in both varieties. The existence of these two varieties leads one to question how their functions are divided, and whether we might consider the deaf community to be diglossic. Ferguson (1959) defined diglossia as a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language... there is a very divergent, highly codified superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and spoken Deuchar purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation (Ferguson 1959: 336). This superposed variety is termed High or H by Ferguson, and the other Low or L. While H is used in public, formal settings such as church, school, and news broadcasting, L is used in more private, informal settings such as conversation among friends. In addition to the defining speech communities that Ferguson uses, Arabic, Modern Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole, the notion of diglossia has been extended to many others, including recently two sign language communities , that of...