The Language of the Deaf Community - Essay Example

Some cultures are united ideologically and philosophically not so much by the geographic proximity of its individual members, or by simply shared value systems. Some communities and cultures are brought together by necessity, and, accordingly, they have their own language, which reflects its speakers. The culture of deafness has produced, through no small effort, an unspoken language of gestures and motions, which can be completely read and spoken non-verbally. Sign language is a natural language, meaning that it is as much a language in its characteristics as any other spoken one, and has been accepted into the scholarly community of leading experts. Instead of individual phonemes being connected to form the rudimentary parts of an out-loud language, sign language uses individual movements to create meaning. Nevertheless, the language itself is not merely a tool used by a particular community to express and communicate thoughts, emotions, and ideas to other people. A living object connects members of the deaf community across ethnographic boundaries, a range of diverse backgrounds, and a number of very different hearing loss disorders. In a rare look into the culture of deafness from a complex sociocultural perspective, anthropologists Richard J. Senghas and Leila Monaghan (2002) raised questions about community identity, language ideology, and cultural formation/maintenance, in an effort to learn about the kind of culture that deafness has produced within the last century. The researchers correctly identify deafness not merely as the absence of hearing, but as a community of many speakers with many different languages and cultural practices. On a superficial level, the language of the deaf community reflects the nature of that community as one comprised of people who are inherently incapable of using the spoken word. Nevertheless, on a more fundamental level, the language of the deaf community reflects deafness as a matter of social construction, and that understanding the deaf language is instrumental to understanding the deaf community. Linguistic communities are collections of people who can and do communicate with one another using language. Deaf people, or members of the deaf community, participate in these linguistic communities through a fully-formed language that bears the hallmarks of all natural languages, as identified in Stokoe’s (1980) and Washabaugh’s (1981) surveys. The participation in a linguistic community means that the anthropological, sociological, and linguistic study of the deaf community may provide insight into numerous issues of general significance to all of these disciplines. That is, depending on the methodology of the researcher, the deaf community has much to say about how language and culture is shaped by the environment and abilities of participant-speakers. It is an opportunity to observe language-uses amongst individuals without the ability to communicate through conventional means. The major focus of the Senghas and Monaghan (2002) review is to make observations about the methodologies of researchers when it comes to a particular focus, whether that focus is anthropological, ethnographic, or linguistic. They state their first major goal as “to review studies about communities of people who are deaf, with an emphasis on sign languages and anthropological contributions”. The second is “to suggest theoretical and methodological avenues worth further pursuit” (p. 70). Thus, Senghas and Monaghan hope to guide further research in the area, looking at the potential and unique opportunity that deaf culture provides in terms of its anthropological significance. Moreover, while the article is primarily centered on methodology, it is a comprehensive survey of the sub-field and thus provides theoretical guidance to research based on an evaluation of previous research. For example, the authors say, social organization, culture, identity, and sociolinguistic variation are all parts of the puzzle when dealing with this area of anthropology. Their study is permeated by these concepts, and all of these concepts have a particular place in the research. One of the more interesting concepts in this context is that ideology: ideology as reflected within a language and instantiated within the community. The idea that a language itself can have a particular ideology is an anthropological one. It suggests that a language can have a value system inherent inside of it. Of course, this should make sense, because a language is the construct of a community (in particular, a linguistic community) and communities certainly have their own value systems. Intuitively, these value systems would be reflected in the language. Deaf languages, like American Sign Language (ASL), are a particularly interesting case of value systems being inherent in the language, since quite often the individual markers (or symbols) in the deaf language are not arbitrary collections of phonemes to create meaning. For example, the gesture for “glasses” in American Sign requires the speaker to show the rim of the classes with a “C” shaped to the hand. When not all eyeglasses bear rounded rims, the rounded rims of the gesture may suggest something about the norms of the linguistic community, more so than in the spoken word where the term “glasses” in English communities makes no judgment about norms in shape. Accordingly, there is far much more room in unspoken languages than in spoken ones to inject values and ideologies: general perceptions of the world by the language speakers and community members. A linguistic ideology, as the term is defined in Senghas and Monaghan (2002), refers to “ideology through language because grammatical structures and terms (i.e., lexicon and categories of concepts) may possibly influence actors’ predispositions toward certain patterns of social thought and action” (p. 84). The influence of values on ideology should be clear. Values take on a different from, as patterns of choice and free will, and are not manifested through terms or structures, but do influence actors’ predispositions toward certain patterns of thought and action. In that sense, values and ideologies are conceptually equivalent. Speakers (or signers) in the deaf linguistic community invite an interesting line of research because, as Senghas and Monaghan phrase it, the visual/spatial modality of the language they speak and sign. Having spatial and modal variation in the language (that is, using three-dimensions as the means of communication instead of zero-dimensional sound in the case of spoken languages) provides far more structural possibilities. This point implies that if, as many believe, diverse linguistic patterns stimulate or enable different realities (or at least perceptions of reality), then the distinction between signed languages and spoken languages should model the distinctive structures in conceptions of reality. Particularly important to the study of the deaf linguistic community is the recognition that the distinction between deaf and not-deaf is not a binary, and that the issues of deafness (perhaps sociocultural or audiological) should not be confined to binaries. A more complex understanding of the deafness category is provided by looking at perceived binaries, like in the case of Eckert (1989) which examined the distinction between the U.S. cultural concepts of “Jocks” and “Burnouts”. All members of a linguistic community bear some kind of linguistic ideology. In the Eckert (1989) study, even those participants who decided not to classify themselves as a “Jock” or a “Burnout” and were some kind of “In-between” were using “terms consistent with a pervasive hegemonic ideology” to identify themselves as such (Senghas & Monaghan, 2002, p. 73). In the deaf community, multiple degrees and therefore problematic categories have already been identified, such as the hard-of-hearing (incomplete deafness) and the offspring of deaf parents. Thus, instead of a binary classifier, or even a spectrum between the two simple categories, the deaf community aligns itself with several distinct categories, and a center on each category. Each category is subject to some kind of pervasive ideology that is then in turn reflected in the language members of the community use to speak to one another. Studies of deaf ideology have identified a complex and evolving system of grammatical structures that connect the language being used within the linguistic community to the value systems of the community itself. A major methodological error, as identified by Senghas and Monaghan, has been to mistake the issue of deafness as a binary, when analyzing the linguistic community, and the corresponding linguistic ideology, is a far more complex issue that must take into account many different categories of speaker-participants. However, research into deafness in the context of anthropological linguistics is still budding, and there is much to be learned from now pervasive communities of deaf signers. The use of hand gestures to create meaning differs categorically from the use of the spoken word, and perhaps forms another kind of language usage besides the conventionally classified speaking, reading, and writing. In addition, as Senghas and Monaghan clearly demonstrate, methodologies of anthropological researchers have a clear and present effect on the kinds of linguistic issues that are studied and surveyed. For example, focusing on the history of deaf communities, researchers can connect current issues within the language to roots in the past, such as the key role played by education in the creation and maintenance of not only the language but also the communities that speaks it. Deaf culture has generated a unique natural language of signs, which has is as much a language any other spoken one. Sign language has gained acceptance by leading experts. Anthropologists Senghas and Monaghan (2002) correctly identify deafness not merely as the absence of hearing, but as a community of many speakers with many different languages and cultural practices. From their survey of the literature on the subject, one sees that deaf language reflects the nature of that community as one inherently incapable of the spoken word. In addition, the language of the deaf community reflects deafness as a matter of social construction, and that understanding the deaf language is instrumental to understanding the deaf community. Works Cited Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories. New York: Teachers College. Senghas, R. J., & Monaghan, L. (2002). Signs of Their Times: Deaf Communities and the Culture of Language. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 31 , 69-97. Stokoe, W. C. (1980). Sign language structure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 9 , 365-90. Washabaugh, W. (1981). Sign language in its social context. Annual Review of Anthrology, 10 , 237-52. Read More