Name Signs as Identity Symbols in the Deaf Community

SLS 16 (1977), 237-246 O William C. Stokoe NAME SIGNS AS IDENTITY SYMBOLS IN THE DEAF COMMUNITY Kathryn P. Meadow In every culture, great importance is attached to the naming of children. There is a whole complex of legal as well as cultural norms attached to the assignment of first names and the changing of surnames. There are special customs, sanctions, rituals, and ceremonies attending the naming of children in particular religious and ethnic groups that symbolize the entrance, acceptance, and welcome of a new group member, and that reflect the importance of group cohesion . Names are a key symbol and summary of personal identity, the first identifying marker used for specifying an individual. The form of address that is used, the use of a title plus surname, the first name, the nickname, diminutive, or pejorative form of the formal name very quickly captures the symbolic essence of the relationship between two persons. The study of names and naming can often provide interesting and revealing insights about a particular subgroup within a larger culture. It was this general formulation that led to my interest in examining the assignment and use of name signs in the deaf community. This paper was presented at the Symposium "Culture and Language in the Deaf Community, " American Anthropological Association, Mexico City, November 1974. Data on which it is based were collected with aid from the Research Evaluation and Allocation Committee, University of California, San Francisco . Grateful acknowledgement is made to David Peterson and Clara Saunders in the collection of data from the deaf community, and to Iris Daigre and Lynn Meadow for coding. Sign Language Studies 16 A name sign, in the context of the American Sign Language used by approximately three-fourths of deaf adults in the United States, is a formalized gesture, referring to an individual's proper name. A sign, i.e. a morpheme of this language, has three components: One is the shape and presentation of the hand (or hands); the second is the placement of the hand in relation to the body; the third is the action of the hand. The shape of the hand for a name sign is very often identical to the handshape of the American Manual Alphabet letter used in spelling out the initial letter of the individual's first or last name. The placement and movement used in name signs show more variation. I had been casually interested in the characteristics of name signs for several years, and often asked deaf friends about the circumstances of the assignment of their name signs, their meaning, and usage. In a paper on sociolinguistics and deaf subculture, delivered at Western Maryland College in 1971, I mentioned this interest and suggested that it might be. a productive area for study as a means of learning about the development of individual identity and as a reflection of the process of identification within the deaf community in a more general sense (Meadow 1972). This brief and casual reference aroused great interest and much excited comment from the audience, many of whom were deaf, and it became the stimulus for the collection of name sign data that are now being analyzed. This report is a brief and preliminary discussion of early examination of these data. Source of data. Sporadically, over a period of two years, name sign data have been collected, primarily by two persons, native deaf signers themselves, with complete access to the deaf community network in California. No attempt was made to obtain a random sample, and no pretensions are made that the data are representative of the deaf community as a whole. I will be unable to say anything, therefore , about the proportion of deaf children or adults who have name signs, but I can say something about the patterns of name sign assignment and usage within the possibly special group of persons reported on. Contacts were made with deaf people at social gatherings, at deaf clubs, at meetings of state and national deaf organizations, at meetings of professionals working within the deaf community, and at state residential schools for the deaf. Every person reporting was Meadow asked to describe his name sign (or signs if he had...