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Standardization of Sign Languages (SLS, Vol. 15, No. 4, Summer 2015)

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Standardization of Sign Languages (SLS, Vol. 15, No. 4, Summer 2015) ROBERT ADAM Standardization of Sign Languages Abstract Over the years attempts have been made to standardize sign lan- guages.This form of language planning has been tackled by a variety of agents, most notably teachers of Deaf students, social workers, government agencies, and occasionally groups of Deaf people them- selves. Their eforts have most often involved the development of sign language books with lists of signs in alphabetical order (as distinct from sign language principles) and more recently as CD- ROMs, DVDs, or websites.With regard to the all-important question about language standardization, Karin Hoyer asks, “Who is behind the efort?” and goes on to say that “standardization actions (often with the aim of reducing lexical variation) have frequently been undertaken with the strong support of the hearing-run education system—from outside, often without any support from the language users themselves” (2012, 32). Today, sign language planning is still carried out largely by hearing professionals; thus, that standardiza- tion still needs to be examined in relation to “language ownership” (Eichmann 2009). Robert Adam is the coordinator of the WFD Expert Group on Sign Language and Deaf Studies, as well as director of Continuing Professional Development, Deafness Cognition, and Language Research Centre, University College London. This article is based on a presentation I gave at the announcement of the new WFD Statement on the Standardization of Sign Languages in Moscow on May 20, 2014.This statement was prepared by members of the Expert Group on Sign Lan- guage and Deaf Studies: Robert Adam, Ulrike Zeshan, Melissa Dragnac-Hawk,Verena Krausneker,Tatiana Davidenko, and Sam Lutalo-Kiingi.We are grateful for the input provided by Professor Emerita Ceil Lucas of Gallaudet University. 432 Sign Language Studies Vol. 15 No. 4 Summer 2015 Standardization of Sign Languages | 433 Sign Languages Why would one want to standardize sign languages? To answer this, I would like to briefy review the history of Deaf people and sign language and consider several instances of the oppression of sign languages and the very recent recognition of them as bona fde lan- guages.Although Deaf people have used sign languages for millennia (Woll and Adam 2012), both sign languages and Deaf communities have variously experienced systematic oppression by the wider com- munity. Beginning with the Paris school for the Deaf (Lane 1984), the establishment of formal instruction for Deaf people around the world launched the “golden age” of Deaf education. During this era Deaf people were taught in their natural sign language, especially by Deaf people (Ladd 2003, 502), and modern sign languages began to take their current form; it was not until Deaf people came together for formal schooling that sign languages came into being as they are today. Prior to the advent of these schools, it was unlikely that Deaf people were able to socialize with each other (Sutton-Spence and Woll 1999). Because sign languages were later discontinued and Deaf children were educated using spoken language, the 1880 Milan Con- gress is often considered a milestone in the devaluing of sign languages in education (Ladd 2003, 502; Padden and Humphries 1988). Sign languages were not seen as fully fedged languages until re- cent times. During the 1950s, Bernard Tervoort at the University of Amsterdam investigated Deaf schoolchildren’s own esoteric commu- nication system (Tervoort 1953). He concluded with this advice for teachers:“[I]f you want deaf children to learn your language, you frst have to learn theirs” (Knoors 2007).The frst to discuss sign language was William Stokoe, then a professor of English at Gallaudet College, a liberal arts institution for Deaf people in Washington,DC, who sug- gested that Deaf people did not use a substandard form of English in their signing but an actual sign language with its own phonological and grammatical system. In 1965 he and two colleagues published a dictionary (Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg 1965), which included a sociolinguistic description of the Deaf community of the United States. Later, James Woodward (1973) provided sociolinguistic discus- sions of the sign languages of Deaf people in the United States, and 434 | Sign Language Studies Klima and Bellugi (1979) conducted the frst neuroscientifc research on Deaf people. Thus, in comparison to spoken language research, sign language research, which has now been carried out in numerous countries, is a relatively new feld. The frst dictionary of Australian Sign Language (Auslan) was published in 1989 (Johnston 1989), and the frst dictionary of British Sign Language was published in 1992 (Brien 1992). Yet during this time, individuals and organizations around the world have attempted to standardize sign languages by producing dictionaries that ofer only a single sign for a concept and ignore variations.These are used to teach sign language, to train interpreters, and to serve as a record of the language; however, they do not refect the natural richness and variation present in sign languages. As sign languages are for the most part minority languages, it is important to highlight they are full-fedged natural languages, structurally indepen- dent from the spoken languages with which they coexist; certainly they come into contact with spoken languages, but their structure is diferent and autonomous. In certain quarters, there are those who maintain that only one sign should correspond to a single word or concept, which is wrong both from everyday, lay, and academic per- spectives. It is important to note that spoken languages also do not have one word for one concept (for example, English has many syn- onyms for words, but no one ever seeks to standardize English in the same way). What Is Language Standardization? Language planning may include status planning, corpus planning, acquisition planning, and attitude planning and may involve sign languages as well (Reagan 2010). Language standardization is one of the goals of language planning; others are language revival, language purifcation, and language reform (Nahir 2003). Specifcally, lan- guage standardization is a part of corpus planning in that it involves the publication of a dictionary and a grammar and modernization of the grammar (Deumert 2001). A standard language is most commonly defned as a codifed form of a language, which is the uniform linguistic norm (Deumert 2001). Often the most prestigious form of a language becomes standardized, Standardization of Sign Languages | 435 and for standardization to be successful, acceptance of this variety as the norm is vital. For spoken languages, the standard form is most often the dialect that is associated with specifc subgroups and specifc functions. Various languages around the world have standardized forms. For instance, English, Spanish, and French have both a standard form and local dialects.The standard form “becomes the legitimate form, and all other forms become, in the popular mind, illegitimate” (Milroy 2001, 547). History plays a role in this legitimization, and the language of a country may be seen as a part of the nation. Moreover, there are parallels in the history of oppression and marginalization of sign languages (Ladd 2003, 502; Lane 1984), leading to the view that some varieties of sign language are more legitimate than others, which I explain later.Additionally, English and similar languages have “played a very large role in providing the data on which linguistic methods and theories are built” (Milroy 2001, 547). How does the standardiza- tion of sign languages take place? It occurs when certain dictionaries acquire status and are considered “standard.” Native signers rarely use them (Sutton-Spence and Woll 1999), but second-language users who employ these dictionaries become educators and interpreters, and thus these resources have a standardizing efect on the sign language. Examples of Sign Language Standardization Australia. Hearing welfare workers and teachers of Deaf children have made attempts to standardize the sign language of the Australian Deaf community (Abraham 1903; Jeanes, Jeanes, et al. 1972; Jeanes and Reynolds 1982; Jeanes, Reynolds, and Coleman 1989), with some level of involvement by members of the Deaf community.The 1982 version was a result of the Australian Sign Language Development Project, a name that gives us some idea of the aim of this project: to “develop” Australian Sign Language. Deaf people from Melbourne were involved particularly at the committee level, as models for the illustrations, but never as authors of the published product.These representatives of the Deaf community were from the Deaf Committee, a subcommittee of the Board of Management of the Victorian Deaf Society (Flynn 1984). In fact, the acknowledgements include a long list of Deaf peo- ple, but this may indicate a high turnover of Deaf members of the 436 | Sign Language Studies committee. Deaf people tended to attend a number of meetings and then withdraw from the committee, only to be replaced by another Deaf person, so the list of numerous Deaf participants should not be seen as the Deaf community’s endorsement of this work. Publications introduced various foreign signs and morphology signs from ASL and Irish Sign Language:“The Signed English vocabulary was based on a core of genuine Deaf signs which were standardized and restricted in meaning for Signed English in addition to a large number of contrived signs and loan signs from ASL and Gestuno” (Johnston 1989, 475). The dictionary has been widely used in Australia and in educational settings outside Melbourne and thus may have had an infuence on modern Auslan. Japan. In 1980 the Japanese Federation of the Deaf (JFD) obtained funds from the Ministry of Social Afairs to establish a Japanese Sign Language (Nihon Shuwa) Research Group to “increase the vocabulary of Nihon Shuwa signers to help ensure that they would be able to keep up with modern Japanese (both the people and the language) and to help standardize Nihon Shuwa” (Nakamura 2011, 322).
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