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Signed Language Policy

Language policy for signed languages has had a number of overlapping foci: efforts to have governments grant official recognition to signed languages, the provision of bilingual education programs for deaf students, the teaching of signed languages to hearing individuals, and the development of dictionaries, textbooks, and other practical (generally educational) tools. Underlying all of these different kinds of language policy activities are issues related to beliefs and attitudes about signed languages, which in turn raise questions about language rights.

Linguistic Attitudes

One of the challenges faced by linguists is that, since everyone uses language, we also assume that we understand the nature of language. Language is ubiquitous in our lives. Many theorists maintain that it is what makes us human. And yet, our knowledge of language is often profoundly distorted. Despite its status as a defining feature of what it means to be human, most of us know very little about language. Nowhere is the ignorance about language clearer (and more dangerous) than with respect to normative beliefs about language and language attitudes. Broadly speaking, the idea of linguistic legitimacy refers to the notion that some languages are superior to others; that is, they are more developed, more correct grammatically, more logical, better sounding, and so on. The idea of linguistic legitimacy also suggests that some languages are inferior—that is, impoverished, incomplete, illogical, and so on—and, implicitly, that this is true of the speakers of such languages as well. There are innumerable examples of the discourse of linguistic legitimacy in everyday life, which do tell us nothing at all about linguistic differences, but a great deal about issues of power and domination.

In the case of signed languages, the concept of linguistic legitimacy has a long and pernicious history. Indeed, until the 1960s, American Sign Language was dismissed not merely as inferior to English, but often as not really a “language” at all. Although such a view is no longer credible in academic circles (and certainly not among linguists), it remains fairly common to find that one needs to offer an explanation for the legitimacy of signed language in many public settings—just as it remains necessary to explain that signed language is not universal, that it is more than fingerspelling, that it has a grammar of its own, that learning a signed language does not impede learning to read and write a spoken language, and so on. While the more blatant examples of assumptions about the legitimacy of signed languages are certainly present in debates concerning language policy, they are less common than before, and fairly easily dealt with. Today, it is most often more subtle kinds of assumptions about signed language and their users that are the greatest challenge for those concerned with language policy.

Language Rights and Signed Languages

One can see the more subtle sorts of bias involved in language policy for signed languages in the arena of language rights. There is a large literature devoted to the articulation and defense of language rights, and the focus of this literature is primarily on the rights of minority linguistic groups to use, maintain, and protect their languages from larger—often socially, economically, and politically dominant—languages. The claim typically made in the literature on language rights is that such rights are fundamentally human rights (i.e., they are sometimes referred to as “linguistic human rights”). There is also a tension in this literature with respect to whether language rights are best conceived of as individual rights or as group rights—an important matter, given that languages are by their very nature communal rather than individual.

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