Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities

Sign Languages and the Minority Language Policy of the European Union

142 Sign Languages and the Minority Language Policy of the European Union Verena Krausneker The political demands and requests —formulated in unequivocal terms —by the Deaf community (and their interest groups) in the 1990s served as the impetus for this chapter. The key issue within these demands has been the request for linguistic rights, which one might even call linguistic human rights. From a linguistic point of view, the world’s sign languages are minority languages “surrounded” by phonetic languages. Although every country has a Deaf community that uses a national sign language, sign languages are nearly legally recognized in the European Union in only Denmark, Finland , Greece, Portugal, and Sweden (and in thirteen other countries worldwide , according to the World Federation of the Deaf [1998]). In many other countries, because of missing language rights, schooling is still done in a mode that deaf children cannot access, the general level of education is low, and access to higher education is often not provided by the states. Participation in public life, the media, politics, and so on is therefore rather dif- ficult. It is not that deaf people cannot participate because they have an auditory problem; rather, it is because the majority are unfamiliar with the language that deaf people use and interpreters are rarely provided. In the field of social and political work, deafness-related issues are generally dealt with in the confined area of “disabilities,” which ignores the important linguistic question of the status and rights of sign languages. Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson extended the notion of human rights to the realm of languages and developed the strong concept of linguistic human rights. They observed: “Often individuals and groups are treated unjustly and suppressed by means of language. People who are deprived of Linguistic Human Rights may thereby be prevented from enjoying other human rights, including fair political representation, a fair trial, access to education, access to information and freedom of speech, and maintenance Sign Languages and the EU’s Minority Language Policy : 143 1. I use the spelling “EU-rope” and “EU-ropean” to differentiate between the political European Union and geographical Europe respectively. I consider it important to clarify that there is still much more to Europe than the fifteen member states of the EU. of their cultural heritage” (1995, 2). This concept is a crucial one in the perception and handling of the question of linguistic minorities. Some of these linguistic human rights are not available to the majority of the world’s deaf people. In this chapter I analyze the minority language policies of the European Union in general and try to localize the position of sign languages in this context. The question we are concerned with is this: Representatives of minority languages have fought hard for certain rights that have now been granted to all European minority language speakers —but not to the users of sign languages. Why? Why does one hesitate to acknowledge that sign languages are also minority languages and that they are also a part of the “rich cultural European heritage,” which is so often quoted as being worthy of protection? And why is there a total absence of sign languages in all European Union minority language statistics, networks, studies, guidelines, reports, and service facilities?1 THE INSTITUTIONS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: A SCHEMATIC OVERVIEW The European Union differs from all previous national and international models. It is founded on treaties among sovereign nations, rather than a constitution that binds individual states (as is the case in the United States). Another unique aspect of this structure is that EU institutions have the power to enact laws that are directly binding on all citizens of EU member nations. The Union has been described as a supranational entity. The member states have relinquished part of their national sovereignty (although only for those policies that cannot be handled effectively at lower levels of government ) to the EU institutions. The Union is inherently evolutionary; that is, it was designed to allow for the gradual development of European unification. The European Union is governed by five institutions: the European Parliament, the European Council (also called the Council of Ministers), 144 : v e r e n a k r a u s n e k e r 2. Also see the following website: http://www.europa.eu.int. 3. Fritzler et al. 1997, 39. the European Commission, the Court of Justice, and the...