Flemish Sign Language standardisation

Abstract

In 1997, the Flemish Deaf¹ community officially rejected standardisation of Flemish Sign Language. It was a bold choice, which at the time was not in line with some of the decisions taken in the neighbouring countries. In this article, we shall discuss the choices the Flemish Deaf community has made in this respect and explore why the Flemish Deaf community has decided to reject standardisation imposed from above. The main reasons are negative experiences with a former lexical unification scheme within the ‘Signed Dutch’ project and a lack of in-depth lexicological research into Flemish Sign Language. At the same time, it has become clear that a form of spontaneous standardisation has been evolving in the past decades. While the Flemish Deaf community has rejected imposition of a standardised form from above, they have opted to find ways to support this ongoing standardisation process. We shall look at what actions have been proposed and taken in this respect.

Keywords:

• Flemish Sign Language
• language policy
• standardisation
• Signed Dutch

Notes

In the literature on Deaf communities and sign language linguistics, it has become customary to write Deaf with a capital D to refer to the linguistic and cultural minority group of sign language users (regardless of the degree of hearing loss). We shall adhere to this practice when using collectives such as ‘Deaf community’ and ‘Deaf culture’. However, because we do not want to make any statements about individual deaf people and whether they self-identify as members of the cultural–linguistic Deaf community or not, we have chosen not to follow this practice when referring to individual deaf persons (even when they are presented as a group, e.g. Flemish deaf signers).

In the total communication approach, the most important aspect is that communication takes place using whatever means suitable to, and accessible for, the individual deaf child (i.e. speech, fingerspelling, signing, pantomime, etc.). In reality, though, the communication method used often involves a type of simultaneous communication, i.e. a combination of (the morphosyntax of) the spoken language and lexical signs, so that users support spoken words with signs with total disregard of sign language grammatical structures.

These (and other) signs can be found on the freely accessible Internet dictionary at http://gebaren.ugent.be.

In the Dutch original of the quote the term ‘Algemeen Nederlands’ was used, which literally means ‘General Dutch’, to refer to Standard Dutch. This has replaced the former ‘Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands’ (or General Civilised Dutch, usually abbreviated as ABN), which seemed to suggest that people who did not use ABN were not ‘civilised’. Today people tend to use Algemeen Nederlands (usually abbreviated as AN) or Standaardnederlands (Standard Dutch).

The main difference is that in the one interpreter training programme, the ‘unified’ signs were used as opposed to local signs in the other interpreting training programme (cf. Van Herreweghe & Vannuffel, 2000; Van Herreweghe & Vermeerbergen, 2006).

CODA stands for Child of Deaf Adult and usually refers to those hearing people (with deaf parents) who have a sign language as their first language.

Choosing one variety as the standard is a well-known type of imposed standardisation as was, for instance, done with Kiunguja, ‘the Zanzibar dialect of Swahili, as the national linguistic norm in Tanzania’ (Harries, 1983, pp. 127–128, in Reagan, 2001, p. 150).

‘Polycomponential constructions’ or ‘polycomponential signs’ have, in the literature on sign languages, been referred to with a number of different notions (although not always defined in the same way), including ‘classifier predicates’, ‘classifier verbs’, ‘verbs of motion and location’, ‘polymorphemic constructions’, ‘polymorphemic verbs’ and ‘polysynthetic verbs’.