Deaf History and Culture in Spain: A Reader of Primary Documents

PART IV: The Recognition of Deaf Language and Culture

PART IV ! THE RECOGNITION OF DEAF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 223 Sign Language (1992) María Ángeles Rodríguez González Introduction As soon as one man was recognized by another as a sentient, thinking being and similar to himself, the desire or the need to communicate his feelings and thoughts to him made him seek the means for doing so. These means can be dervied only from the senses, the only instruments by which one man may act upon another. Hence the institution of perceptible signs to express throught.1 The nonoral sign languages that deaf people use have scarcely been the object of scientific study. The first steps were taken some thirty years ago in North America, in particular within the field of linguistics. William C. Stokoe, an English professor and member of the Linguistics Research Laboratory in Washington, published, in 1960, Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication System of the American Deaf. These were the first conclusions of his studies, initiated three years prior, on the North American sign language, known as ASL—American Sign Language—or, also, as AMESLAN. Thus, from the year 1960, there began a trajectory of the study of ASL, which would be extended, moreover, to other domains such as sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics and would stimulate, even if only hesitantly, work on the sign and gestural languages used in other countries in Europe such as Great Britain, France, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland. In North America, this scientific curiosity has been accompanied, although more slowly and unevenly, by the recognition of ASL as the natural, mother tongue of a social community, which, in the former country [the United States], with some seven hundred thousand deaf people, ranks as the fourth most used language, after English, Spanish, and Italian. In Spain, where the education of the deaf child has followed the oralist tradition , understood as the teaching of verbal language exclusively, and is now sustained María Ángeles Rodríguez González. Lenguaje de signos (Madrid: Confederación Nacional de Sordos de España, Fundación ONCE [Organización Nacional de Ciegos Españoles], 1992). 1. Editor’s note. J. J. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues [Essay on the origin of languages and writings related to music], trans. John T. Scott (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998), 289–90. 224 DEAF HISTORY AND CULTURE IN SPAIN by the path of integrated education, the language of gestural signs has not yet been the topic of any scientific study whatsoever. If, on one hand, the socioeducational circumstances of every country, following the path of a strict oralism from more than a century ago, have directly influenced the late development of studies of sign language, there are also difficulties of investigation derived from the very nature of said language, such as the fact that it is a nonoral language that exists only in a contextual expression of the here and now, that is, in situational discourse, without a system of written recodification. The study of a language of gestural signs should not be limited, then, to the system of signs in itself; it must account for a context that goes beyond linguistic expression, such as the culture and customs of the different social communities composed of deaf people. It is necessary to analyze the situation in which gestural enunciations are transmitted; their meaning should be interpreted through the situational context, that is, in relation to all those characteristics pertinent to them. Sign Language as an Object of Scientific Study Investigation The existence of such a different language and its observation through the communicative exchanges among deaf people aroused our curiosity of studying what rules controlled the expression of meaning in that language and what mental attitude lay behind those gestural expressions. In February 1982, we began to learn sign language, beginning private classes with a bilingual hearing instructor, the son of deaf parents, who used gestural language on a daily basis not only at home in communicative exchanges with his parents, with whom he lived, but also in his work as an interpreter and cultural promoter of one of the deaf associations in Valladolid. In the beginning, we alternated between learning signs relative to very concrete conceptual domains (relationships, colors, foods, furniture, etc.) and signs for commonly used expressions. Later, we began to “translate” the contents of a wide range of written...