Signing Communities

In the context of this entry, signing communities are defined as communities where Deaf people use sign language to communicate with either hearing or deaf co-inhabitants. Such places (whether real or imagined) are regarded as different from the mainstream where deaf people mostly are surrounded by hearing nonsigning people in their families, schools, and workplaces. Examples in which signing communities have been envisaged or planned such as Flournoy’s commonwealth and Laurent, South Dakota, are discussed. However, as these attempts were not successful, first and foremost, the focus is on real-life situations in which a majority (or at least a very large number of people) know and use sign language: shared signing communities.

Shared signing communities are villages, towns, or groups in which, because of the historical presence of a hereditary form of deafness that is circulated in the communities through endogamous marriages, a relatively high number of deaf people have lived together with hearing people for decades or even centuries. Over the years, the need to communicate with one another in the dense sociocultural networks of these communities has led to the emergence of local sign languages used by both deaf and hearing people, which are also called shared sign languages.

Probably the most well-known shared signing community was located on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, renowned as a place where “everyone spoke sign language” for several hundred years until the early 1950s. Because of a pattern of genetic deafness, circulated through endogamous marriage practices, the rate of deafness on this island averaged 1:155 and peaked at 1:4 in a neighborhood in the town of Chilmark. The community featured a dense social and kin network, and this close contact between deaf and hearing people resulted in the evolution of a sign language that was widely used by both deaf and hearing people in a number of villages on the island on a daily basis, down the generations. [Page 888]Changes in marriage patterns, due to processes of immigration and emigration of both deaf and hearing people, led to the result that deafness on the island died out.

Martha’s Vineyard became a particularly powerful part of the collective memory of the international Deaf community. When its story is recounted, it often sounds like a paradise for Deaf people, who are disappointed when they learn that this “dream” ceased to exist after the mid-20th century. The reason that Deaf people tend to see this place as utopia is because Western societies have struggled for a long time to achieve successful inclusion of deaf people within mainstream society. The reality for the majority of signing Deaf people is growing up in hearing nonsigning families, having hearing nonsigning teachers and colleagues, and having to comply with a hearing nonsigning society. Signing Deaf people have therefore been described as constituting a geographical diaspora, yearning to be together and to use sign language whenever they want to, leading them to imagine ideal places where this is possible.

In addition to recalling and retelling the history of Martha’s Vineyard, there are many examples of fairy tales and fantasy stories in which Deaf people imagine such ideal worlds. Examples are tales in which the roles are reversed, such as in Eyeth, the story about a planet called Eyeth, where Deaf signing people constitute the dominant majority and hearing speaking people the oppressed minority. Other stories fantasize about determined efforts to create such a Deaf majority: In his satirical book Islay, Douglas Bullard writes about the attempts of a deaf man called Sulla to take over a small state in order to constitute a deaf majority there, with the aim of living in harmony with a hearing minority.

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