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7 Sociolinguistic Dynamics in American Deaf Communities: Peer Groups versus Families Ceil Lucas and Susan Schatz The importance of the peer group in shaping and determining sociolinguistic behavior has long been noted in studies of spoken languages (see Labov 1972; Milroy 1987; Eckert 1989). The role of the peer group is particularly important in Deaf communities, especially given the fact that no more than 10% of deaf children are born to deaf parents. Consequently, most deaf children do not have native access to the spoken language of their hearing parents. Although the peer group plays a pivotal role in both spoken language and sign language communities, some sharp areas of contrast do exist. Although the peer group exerts a strong influence in spoken language communities , the language used in the family setting or by caretakers is always present and audiologically available to the children as a competing model. One might say that the situation in Deaf communities parallels the situation found in some spoken language bilingual communities in which parents use one language, possibly a minority language, and the children opt for the majority language. However , the situation in Deaf communities still would seem to be unique: Whereas the parents and children in a bilingual spoken language situation all have audiological access to the various languages (i.e., they can hear them) and choose one or another for sociolinguistic reasons, deaf children do not have similar access to the spoken language of their parents. Although many hearing parents of deaf children are now learning to sign, many still do not sign a majority of the time. The result is that, from earliest childhood, deaf children often communicate with their families by a variety of means, including home sign systems, talking (which the child may be able to produce but not hear), fingerspelling, and writing. In contrast, natural sign language is used in children’s deaf peer groups. It is this language used with school friends that most often becomes the deaf individual’s primary means of communication for life. 141 142 Ceil Lucas and Susan Schatz Residential schools for deaf children have traditionally served as crucibles for the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL), and a variety of social organizations such as local deaf clubs and sports groups have important language maintenance functions. Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan (1996) explain: Sports rapidly become a vehicle of acculturation for the Deaf child, a shared experience, a source of Deaf pride, and an avenue for understanding customs and values in the deaf-world. . . . Athletics . . . also serve linguistic and political functions. ASL is a truly national language, in part because of the co-mingling of Deaf people in the residential schools, in the clubs and in regional and national athletics. (131) By considering the functions of families from a sociolinguistic standpoint, we might better frame the discussion. First, a family provides the child with a native model of language structure that reflects the family’s sociolinguistic reality, including factors such as geographic region, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Second, the family provides a model of appropriate language use, including how to use language in social interactions. Finally, the family provides an avenue for the development of metalinguistic awareness. In the context of family language use, children develop awareness of what their society perceives to be appropriate and inappropriate language use along with the means to talk about this awareness . Deaf children of hearing parents, however, often do not share a common language with their parents and do not acquire their first language from them. The question becomes the following: How and where are the sociolinguistic functions that normally occur within a family carried out in the lives of these deaf children? The goal of this chapter is to explore this question by considering data from a sixyear project (June 1994–July 2000) on sociolinguistic variation in ASL funded by the National Science Foundation. RELATED RESEARCH The research most relevant to the present study has to do with (a) peer interaction among deaf children and (b) the nature of communication in hearing families with a deaf child. With respect to peer interaction, many scholars have recognized the importance of the residential school for deaf children as the site of socialization into the Deaf world (Wright 1969; Markowicz and Woodward 1978; Padden and Humphries 1988; Supalla 1994; Reilly 1995). In addition, they have recognized the fact that this socialization is managed by peers, both in terms of language teaching and the transmission of cultural values...

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