Bencie Woll welcomes a new Centre
I had a lot of punishments for signing in classrooms and at playground … then one morning at assembly I was caught again, then, ordered to stand in front. The headmistress announced that I looked like a monkey …, waving my hands everywhere. She [said] she will put me in a cage in the zoo so the people will laugh at a stupid boy in the cage.1
In a world where speech and language are seen as the same, Deaf people have often been viewed as having a sub-human form of communication.
Despite records of British Sign Language (BSL) going back to the sixteenth century, and the status of BSL as the second most widely used indigenous language in Britain after English, Deaf people, their language and culture have often been ignored and disparaged.
The Deaf community
As with other minority language communities, the Deaf community can best be understood with reference to the surrounding hearing community. Membership of the 100,000-strong British Deaf community is characterised by attitudinal deafness (seeing oneself as distinctly Deaf, rather than as a hearing person with an impairment), marriage within the Deaf community, participation in Deaf social life, and use of BSL. The upper-case D is used to reflect these social and community choices – what has been termed ‘Deafhood’ – in contrast to deafness.
Research on BSL can not only illuminate this unique British minority community, but can also provide real insights into human language and cognition more generally. With the funding by the ESRC of the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, an enormous step forward has been taken in this direction.
The creation of this new Centre places Deaf people at the core of linguistic and psychological research. We will create new tools for assessing sign language and sign language development; describe the role of the face and gesture in language and develop our understanding of how language is processed by the brain.
We can already answer many of the most common questions about BSL.
Who invented BSL?
No one invented it, just as no one invented English. There are records of deaf people using sign language in Britain going back to the 1570s. Sign languages arise naturally wherever there are deaf communities – they weren’t invented by hearing people.
Isn’t sign language universal?
Just as there are many spoken languages – and for the same reasons - there are many different sign languages in the world (over 200 have already been recorded).
Aren’t signs just glorified gestures?
Both spoken and sign languages have their own unique set of rules for how words/signs are formed, combined, and understood, with nouns, verbs, the ability to indicate time, form questions, negate statements, and so on.
In spite of the difference in the channels used for communication, there are striking similarities between the structure of spoken and sign languages. Research has also demonstrated that both are processed in the same areas of the brain.
Are signs just like pictures in the air?
Many signs do resemble the concepts they represent (they are ‘iconic’), but each sign language uses different icons. People learning BSL need to learn the signs used in BSL, and this takes as much time and effort as learning a foreign spoken language.
Can you express abstract concepts in BSL?
All languages have the flexibility and creativity to meet new needs – the vocabulary of the language expands as new concepts arise. BSL is no exception. In recent years, new signs have appeared for ‘fax’, , ‘wi-fi’, ‘genetics’, etc. The assumption that BSL has inherent deficiencies in its vocabulary or has a simple structure is without basis.
Outlook for BSL
At the beginning of the 21st century, there are two contrasting futures for BSL. There are pressures, such as the move to mainstream education, and the possible decrease in the Deaf population as a result of medical intervention and advances in genetics. On the other hand, there are increased demands from the hearing community for courses in BSL, increased use of BSL in public contexts such as television, increased pride of the Deaf community in their distinctive language and culture, and new research. We hope that BSL will continue to be a living language.
References
1. Kyle & Woll (1985). Sign Language: the study of deaf people and their language Cambridge University Press, p. 263
Professor Bencie Woll is Director of the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre based at University College London
b.woll@ucl.ac.uk