I think that trying to learn and
understand ASL (American Sign Language) or any other recognized sign language
is as difficult as any foreign language. The difference, though, is that the
voice plays no part at all in signing. ASL, like all sign languages, is visual
and manual. There is nothing oral about it.
It is because there is no speech in
sign languages that there has been and still exists so much opposition to them.
This stance against the use of sign languages has been born out of the
ignorance and hurtful attitudes that always accompany any kind of prejudice. In
this case, the prejudice has a name. It is audism.
As an academic, author, and
lecturer on Deaf culture and communication, Tom L. Humphries coined and defined
the term audism as an attitude held by
people who hear and speak. Their opinion is that, because they can hear and
speak, they are superior to those who don’t.
I have been a witness to audism my
entire life. I see it frequently played out with parents who don’t learn ASL,
even though they have a deaf or hard of hearing child. They expect their child
to lip read or even speak. As a little girl with a horrible undiagnosed speech
problem, I had the same experience with my parents. Even though I couldn’t even
say my name to save my life, I was forced to answer phone calls and my parents
expected me to speak normally.
Although there were deaf schools
throughout the ages, they were always threatened by oralists. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oralism,
“Oralism is the education of deaf students through oral language by using lip
reading, speech, and mimicking the mouth shapes and breathing patterns of
speech, instead of using sign language.”
Oralism has been an enemy of the
deaf for eons. Even the church in Spain in the 1500s banned the deaf from
communion because they couldn’t confess out loud. In those days the deaf of
wealthy families were disinherited to keep up appearances. The nobility sent
their deaf children away to schools where they were presumably being taught to
speak, holding the belief that speaking was representative of the higher class
and, therefore, higher intellect. This was also interpreted to mean that
signing was connected to the lower class and lower intellect.
Before the oralist movement ruined the lives and
livelihood of many deaf people, there were deaf schools with deaf instructors.
There were deaf doctors, lawyers, and deaf people held other respectable
positions. However, in the late 1800s one of the worst oralists of all time
began to wield his power. I was shocked when I learned that Alexander Graham
Bell, inventor of the telephone, made the lives of so many deaf people utterly
miserable.
Interestingly, Bell worked on inventing the telephone
because his mother and wife were both deaf. He had experimented with different
hearing devices and it was this work that led to his most famous invention.
Yet, Bell opposed the teaching of sign language, as well as deaf intermarriage
and reproduction. As a staunch oralist, he believed that the deaf must
assimilate into the hearing world.
There is a very famous event in Deaf history known as
the Milan Congress of 1880. It was in Milan, Italy where oralists like
Alexander Graham Bell gathered and were able to force their beliefs onto
society at large. Bell and his allies were able to begin closing deaf schools
all around the world that taught sign language and replace them with oral ones.
Not only did this cruelly force the deaf to try to speak and lip read, but it
put deaf teachers out of work and, more and more, the deaf became uneducated
and unemployed.
Fortunately, there were enough deaf students and
adults who still used signing in their private lives. And, with the support of
the manual movement by important people
like the educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (founder of the first school for deaf
children in the United States), sign language was kept alive.
When I learned about all of this I was so saddened to
hear how the deaf had to fight just to preserve their means of communication.
But, because of my personal experience, I was not shocked. Even though I grew
up in the 1960s, what we would think of as modern times, I was also forced to
speak when I couldn’t. I was not allowed to learn ASL either. However, by studying
this history I realized that millions of other people throughout history were
viewed and, most likely, felt like me. Their families and society tried to
strip them of their true identity, so they didn’t feel accepted for who they
were. Like me, they must have felt isolated because there was no support. Like
me, many of them probably felt like failures at times, simply because they
couldn’t speak.
By looking at the struggle to keep
sign language alive, I hope a normal speaker can better understand the kind of
prejudice that has existed and still exists towards those who are physically
unable to speak. It is a prejudice that blinds people from seeing that the
inability to speak for someone who is speech disabled or deaf is due to a
physical limitation and nothing more. And, if anyone should suspect
that the intellect is less because one signs and
doesn’t speak, I suggest they learn how to sign as well.
