Signed Language Rights, Attitudes Toward

Rights

About a fourth of the world’s nation-states have awarded their national signed language(s) some official or legal status as a language. The rights of users of so-called recognized signed languages, however, differ greatly from country to country: Some Deaf communities indicate that their thriving development is mostly based on the use of their signed language in the area of education (e.g., Sweden, to name the most well-known example and the first country in the world to recognize its national signed language, Swedish Sign Language [STS], in 1981). Other signed languages are named in the federal constitutional law, such as Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS), to name just one, but this specific recognition brings very few actual linguistic rights that Deaf sign language users can claim. The vast majority of signed language communities rely on a few more or less effective laws in specific areas of life (media, education, equal access, etc.).

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas developed a grid to visualize and compare language rights legislation. On the vertical axis of the two-dimensional grid, she differentiates between degrees of overtness and [Page 884]covertness; on the horizontal axis, she differentiates between assimilation and maintenance-oriented measures.

The opposite of rights would not be the absence of such but the general prohibition of a language. This has been the case in some states for some languages (e.g., Kurdish in Turkey until 1991), but we know of no country where the Deaf community faced such a general and total prohibition of the use of its national sign language. There are, of course, manifold examples of domain-specific bans of sign language use. Some of them are/were enforced officially (like after the Milan Congress in 1880 when sign language was banned from many schools for the Deaf), and others unfold covertly. An example of a covert sign language ban would be the missing of signed languages in teacher training and curricula and the resulting absence of signed languages in official classroom communication.

We can also differentiate between the right to a language, which should prevent linguistic genocide; the rights of languages, which promote the languages as such; and rights through languages, which will secure access and rights for their users. If we tap into the experiences of Deaf communities over the past few decades in order to define specific rights for sign language users, they would mostly be in the area of right to a language and rights through languages.

Without ranking them according to priority, we could list as necessary rights for Deaf people the right to be born; the right to an age-appropriate natural language acquisition; the right to barrier-free education; the right to literacy in the dominant/national language; the right to information; the right to professional interpreting services in educational, legal, and medical settings as well as public administration; the right to access to employment; the right to maintain one’s language, culture, and identity; and freedom of opinion and expression.

...