deaf/Deaf: Origins and Usage

Deaf—Origins and Original Usage

One of the first known uses of the word Deaf was in a paper James Woodward wrote and presented in March 1975, at a symposium on majority and minority language at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Amsterdam. The title of the paper was “How You Gonna Get to Heaven if You Can’t Talk With Jesus: The Educational Establishment Vs. the Deaf Community.” Woodward stated: “Throughout this paper, the convention of capitalizing the word ‘Deaf’ is utilized when the word refers to any aspect of the Deaf community and its members. Uncapitalized ‘deaf’ refers to the audiological condition of deafness.” The first published article to contain exactly the same information about the origin of Deaf was Markowicz and Woodward in 1978.

Woodward’s notion of deaf/Deaf was inspired by his encounters with deaf and hearing individuals at Gallaudet University (formerly Gallaudet College) in Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s. Knowing that Woodward was interested in the grammatical structure of American Sign Language (ASL), several hearing and several deaf individuals on a number of separate occasions suggested that Woodward meet a [Page 285]man who had excellent skills in ASL. However, all of the hearing people referred to the man as “hard of hearing,” while all of the deaf people referred to the man as “deaf.” Woodward was intrigued by these differences in classification of the man’s identity. When Woodward finally met the man, Woodward informed this man that hearing people called him “hard of hearing” and that deaf people called him “deaf” and then proceeded to ask him what he thought about himself, including how he felt about himself and whether he categorized himself as deaf or hard of hearing. The man’s answer was, “I am deaf, but I can use the telephone.”

It was immediately obvious to Woodward that this man’s “deafness” had no real relation to his audiological hearing status and that it was important to have a way to clearly distinguish audiological hearing status from perceived social identity, just as this individual had done. Woodward decided that the most appropriate manner to conduct this important distinction was to use the uppercase Deaf when referring to a sociocultural framework of being deaf and the lowercase deaf as an all-encompassing term to represent the deaf population.

Woodward’s use of “deaf/Deaf” was never intended to be a taxonomy. People can be both deaf and Deaf at the same time. In fact, most members of the Deaf community are also audiologically deaf and culturally Deaf at the same time. There are also individuals who are audiologically hard of hearing and culturally Deaf. And there are audiologically deaf people who do not choose to identify with the Deaf community, and these people are audiologically deaf but not culturally Deaf in the original sense of the term, since they are not members of a Deaf community.

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