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Language Census of Sign-Language Users in Spain: Attitudes in a Changing Language Community Victòria Gras i Ferrer Spain has always been a multilingual country. It is difficult to find a state in Europe in which this phenomenon does not occur, especially in the last three centuries. Vernacular, colonizing, and foreign (also called ‘‘immigrant’’) languages, together with the majority languages and the lesser-used or minority languages, all intermingle in the same geographical area and thus are a concern of every state.1 During this time the first record of sign languages as shared by a community has also emerged. The way in which each state has dealt with this issue has influenced the circumstances, with regard to both corpus and status development, of every language used within its geographical and political boundaries. In Europe, the nineteenth-century legacy of ‘‘one language, one state’’ favored linguistic assimilation and simply ignored other languages that were as commonly spoken in each country. Nowadays, especially after World War II and with the awareness of language rights as a fundamental human right, policies that do not take into account the variety of linguistic codes used in a country are seen as segregating and incomplete. In Spain, the constitution of 1978 finally acknowledged the country’s multilingual nature: ‘‘Castilian is the official language of the State. . . . The other Spanish languages will also be official in their own Autonomous Community’’ (Spanish Constitution, preliminary section, article 3). This was the beginning of systematic research on minority languages. Language censuses have emerged as instruments that measure the state of vernacular languages in most of the autonomous communities with a co-official language.2 We can find examples of sociolinguistic maps of Catalan from 1981 (Catalan Sociolinguistics Institute, Department of Culture, Barcelona, 2000), sociolinguistic planning maps of the Basque language from 1986 (General Secretariat of Language Policy of the Basque Government 1989), and a sociolinguistic map of Galician from 211 1993 (Royal Academy of Galician 1996). That is to say, the fact that autonomous governments are now able to decide their own language affairs indicates that certain institutions have assumed the responsibility of protecting the vernacular languages in these areas. Today more than 16.6 million people, 40 percent of the total population of the country, live in one of the six autonomous communities with a co-official language, according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadı́stica (INE [National Institute of Statistics] 2001a).3 In addition, in three other communities, vernacular languages are still spoken, although no statutes protect their use.4 In one area of Catalonia, the Aran valley, a dialect of Gascon, Aranés, is spoken; this area is the only region of Spain with three official languages: Spanish, Catalan, and Aranés. Furthermore, caló, or the Romani language, is spoken by gypsies residing in Spain. According to a 1994 estimate by Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue .com/), Spain, besides these ten spoken languages, has two sign languages : Spanish Sign Language, with 102,000 users, and Catalonian Sign Language, with 18,000 users. However, until very recently, no study had been carried out on sign language in Spain similar to the ones on coof ficial spoken languages, apart from those that had focused on the pathological view of deafness. The last of these studies (conducted by INE in 1999 and published in 2001) is an in-depth report on disabilities and impairments in Spain (see INE 2001) and provides a thorough analysis of deafness that takes into account variables such as age and sex. However, the study provides no information on how many of these people are sign-language users and hence are members of a linguistic community . In 1997 the European Union of the Deaf (EUD) carried out a project called Sign on Europe, which studied the status of sign language in seventeen different European countries, including Spain (Kyle and Allsop 1997). This study, in which between eight and thirty-two interviews were conducted in every country, gives us an overview of the status of sign languages in Europe, and I refer to it several times as a valuable source of comparison with our data. The project that is presented here represents the first linguistic census of sign languages in Spain and encompasses the country’s entire signing population including users of both Spanish and Catalan Sign Language. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT In January 2001 the Department of Research and Teaching Materials of the Spanish National...

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