Language policies, language rights, and sign languages: A critique of disability-based approaches

ABSTRACT

Among the focus of language policies addressing sign languages have been efforts to achieve official recognition for various national sign languages, coupled with the recognition of the language rights of d/Deaf people. The recognition of sign languages has most often taken place as a result of lobbying efforts by national Deaf communities, generally with the support of sympathetic hearing supporters. As a rule, efforts to grant official recognition to sign languages are seen as progressive undertakings, but such recognition is almost always grounded both ideologically and epistemologically in misguided views of d/Deaf people. The author provides a distinction between different kinds of language policies concerned with sign languages and suggests that policies granting official recognition to sign languages are fundamentally different in nature from language policies granting such status to spoken languages. The author argues that this difference is due to fundamentally indefensible assumptions about the legitimacy of sign languages as full and complete human languages. Finally, the implications for the language rights of sign language peoples that emerge from this unique nature of language policies for sign languages will be explored.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The phrase national sign languages is used here to indicate that, just as is the case with spoken languages, although there is most often a single dominant sign language in a country, there are also typically other sign languages present, ranging from full-blown and complete sign languages to systems of home signing that are used in contexts in which a d/Deaf person lives surrounded by hearing people and without significant contact with other d/Deaf people.

2. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, it became common in the literature dealing with d/Deaf people, Deaf Studies and sign languages to distinguish between deaf and Deaf: the former referring to deafness solely as an audiological condition, while the latter to Deafness as a linguistic and cultural condition. Although this is a valuable distinction, to some extent it oversimplifies and dichotomizes d/Deafness. I have chosen to follow the common usage when either purely audiological deafness is intended or when purely sociocultural Deafness is intended (as in the Deaf community). When a more inclusive sense seems appropriate, or where the meaning is ambiguous, I use d/Deaf and d/Deafness, which is the increasingly common form used in writing about this population.

3. The phrase sign language peoples has been used by some writers to emphasize that we are talking about communities that use a sign language as their vernacular language. The emphasis is thus on the community as a linguistic one, and has no implications that might be considered to be audist or ableist in nature (see Batterbury, Ladd, & Gulliver, 2007).

4. This is a significant overgeneralization, of course: d/Deafness is an incredibly complex phenomenon audiologically, culturally, linguistically, educationally, and socially. This bifurcation is thus extremely misleading in many cases, but it remains widely used as a heuristic device to assist those not particularly familiar with d/Deafness.

5. Estimates for the number of fluent users of ASL in the United States vary dramatically, from a low of around 100,000 to a high of 12,000,000. As Mitchell et al. (2006) noted, however, “all of the population estimates greater than 500,000 appear to have resulted from conflating deafness with ASL use and to be based on demography of deafness estimates” (p. 328). The best estimates seem to be about 500,000; Mitchell & Karchmer (2005; cited in Compton, 2014) suggested a range of 360,000 to 517,000 users of ASL in the United States (including both d/Deaf and hearing signers).

6. Although the policy debates about “English only” and ASL are generally seen as unrelated, this is not in fact the case—the same underlying colonialist and neocolonialist ideologies are at play (see, for instance, Macedo, 2000; Martin, 2001).

7. It has become common in the technical literature to distinguish between language rights and linguistic human rights (see Grin, 2005; Hamel, 1997; Kontra, Phillipson, Skutnabb-Kangas, & Várady, 1999; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, in collaboration with Rannut, 1995). Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) suggested that language rights differ from linguistic human rights in terms of what is necessary, as opposed to what is desirable (i.e., what is enrichment oriented). Linguistic human rights (that is, language rights plus human rights) are those which are required to meet basic human needs and which are to live a dignified life (such as having a language-related identity, access to one’s mother tongue, the right of access to an official language, at least primary education in one’s mother tongue, and so on). For the most part, I concern myself with linguistic human rights here.

8. This is so because the vast majority of d/Deaf people (perhaps as many as 95%) have hearing parents, and most will have hearing children (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004, 2005). This means that sign languages are most often passed on from child to child—a process that has historically tended to occur in residential schools for the deaf.