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BARBARA GERNER DE GARCIA he Dominican Republic is a Spanish-speaking country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. It is located between the other two Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands-Puerto Rico to the east and Cuba to the west. In this country of over 6,000,000 there are no statistics on the deaf population. In the Dominican Republic there was no national system of deaf education until 1967, when the first national school was established. Since then, education has varied in quality as governments and the internal politics of the school itself have changed. There are now about 800 students in the national school and its thirteen satelIite classes around the country. About seven years after the founding of the national school, a group of American missionaries who came to the Dominican Republic from Puerto Rico to run a summer bible camp introduced a manually coded Spanish that used the American Sign Language (ASL) lexicon. Although deaf Dominicans report that there was no sign language on the island before the missionaries' arrival in the mid-1970s (sign language seems to be looked upon as a gift from the outside, brought by the missionaries), it is likely that there was some kind of indigenous sign language in the Dominican Republic at that time. l'he result of the introduction of the missionaries' sign language somewhat parallels what occurred in the United States when Laurent Clerc brought French Sign Language (LSF) to America. LSF creolized with the existing signed languages used in America at the time. Indigenous signs still exist in the Dominican Republic, but how and when they originated is a matter of conjecture. There are reportedly no deaf children of deaf parents in the country. Marriages between deaf people have occurred only in the past six years or so, as young deaf people have been brought into contact with one another through the school. There are two families, one in Santo Domingo and one in the second largest city, Santiago, that each have four adult deaf children and a number of hearing children. The family in Santo Domingo uses home signs, and its youngest member is also fluent in Dominican Sign Language and interprets for his older brother and two sisters. This family likely makes up what Washabaugh (1979) calls a "linguistically critical mass." That is, it has enough deaf people to evolve a code for communication. Such families, and other linguistically critical masses, are a means by which indigenous signs may evolve. lt is likely that in the Dominican Republic, before the arrival of the missionaries, The Developing Deaf Community in the Dominican Republic deaf children at school were communicating with each other, ignoring the prohibition on signing, and that their signs became part of the indigenous sign language. The sign language these deaf Dominicans used as children in school was most likely immature (they probably did not think of it as their language) and did not have the chance to mature because deaf children were together for only seven or eight years before the ASL-based system-which was more complete than the evolving indigenous system-was introduced.Their perception that sign language came to them from Puerto Rico is probably owing to the lack of an identity for the indigenous sign language. The Deaf Community in the Dominican Republic The Dominican deaf community has been in formation only since the founding of the national school. The group of deaf students first brought together in the national school twenty years ago now forms the base for an emerging deaf community. In 1982 this group set up a deaf club, and although the club is still controlled by the organization that runs the national school, its members are struggling for autonomy. There has been little research on the deaf communities of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, but Washabaugh and Woodward (1979, 1980, 1981, and 1986) have each done research on the deaf people of the English-speaking Caribbean. Washabaugh (1981) describes three kinds of deaf communities: 1. diglossic deaf communities, such as the United States deaf community, where there is a majority language to be learned and the minority language is disdained; 2. isolated deaf communities, like Providence Island, where formal education is not necessary in order to contribute to the life of the community, and deaf people are accepted, though they are not part of the real life of the community and do not feel a sense of unity with other deaf people; and 3. developing...

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