deaf language

deaf language






by: Ibrahimewaters

All languages ​​have a name that designates them and distinguishes them from the rest of the languages ​​that exist in the world. The Spanish, Russian, German and Japanese nouns are words that in the language in which I write this article name the languages ​​spoken by four different peoples of the planet. Also the visuo-spatial languages ​​developed by the Deaf communities have received particular denominations, usually phrases in the oral languages ​​of the country where each deaf community is settled, and which designate and distinguish the languages ​​of these communities among themselves: Venezuelan Sign Language , Spanish Sign Language, Colombian Manual Language, Costa Rican Sign Language, etc.

In the following lines I will comment on certain historical and linguistic issues related, in general, with the choice of a name for a language, and especially with the denominations that receive the visuo-spatial languages ​​of the Deaf.
Where do the names of the languages ​​come from?

Where do the names of the languages ​​come from? What determines that they receive a particular denomination? Answering these questions accurately would involve giving an individual account of the history of each language, but we can venture to some generalizations, not devoid of speculation, to reach the point we want: each human group feels the need to give a name to their language when charging awareness that there are differences between them and other groups whose speech they do not understand.

This desire for differentiation becomes concrete in the act of designating one's own way of speaking with phrases such as "speak of such a place", "speak of the people" (It is common for many peoples to call themselves the same word that they designate in their languages This can be observed among several Venezuelan Amerindian peoples (in the Wayúú - La Guajira - and Pemón - Venezuelan Amazonian communities, for example) or, simply, "speaks." This can be illustrated by the cases of the Japanese language, the "nihongo", which means literally "speaks Nihon", which is what the Japanese call their country, or "Wayuúnaiki", a word that designates the language of the original inhabitants of the Peninsula de la Guajira (north of Venezuela and Colombia), which literally translates as "speaks of the people", or the case of "papiamentu", the language of the Netherlands Antilles, whose name comes from the verb "papiar" (" talk ).

Once a group has linguistically called itself, the name chosen will be adopted by the people who are in contact with it. It happens then that the original denomination goes through transformations imposed by the pronunciation of the other languages, and the result is sometimes difficult to recognize for the denominated group. This is what happened, for example, with the "lingua hispaniensis", the language of Hispania, which was how the modified Latin spoken by the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, and from which our "Spanish language" comes " The original Latin name, later passed through the phonetic screening of the languages ​​that adopted it, underwent changes such as "ispániesh" (in Russian), "spánska" (in Czech), "Spanisch" (in German) or "supéingó" (in Japanese).

The languages ​​that the Deaf communities of the world have developed undergo somewhat different denomination processes, although comparable in some points to those described above, typical of the history of oral languages. There are two ways of establishing designations for these languages ​​of the Deaf communities: the first of them arises within the same community or is received on loan from another, and is a sign with double nominal value (translatable as "signs" or "Signs") and verbal (equivalent to the Spanish "señar", "make signs" or "sign"). This double value can be illustrated with a phrase of the Venezuelan Sign Language (LSV):

PRO2 SIGN / GOOD SIGNS,

whose semantic value is equivalent to the Spanish sentences "you signal well" and "your sign language is good".

In the Deaf communities that I have been able to know more closely, those of Colombia, Germany and Venezuela, the majority of references made to their own language are made with a signal very similar to the one described. In this sense, these communities of deaf people act according to the pattern described above for the "papiamentu", with the exception that, unlike the denomination of the Antillean language, neither the other sign languages, nor the other oral languages ​​that they are in contact with those designated languages ​​seem to adopt that name to name it





         These signs also work, in Deaf communities, as defining the identity of the group in front of the community of listeners, whose way of communicating with each other usually receives another signal, which is often related to oral speech, that is, with the condition of a listener, not Deaf. To give an example, in the LSV that sign is glossed as SPEAKING, and is the following:
SPEAK-LSV
SPEAK (LSV)

The second type of denomination received by the visuo-spatial languages ​​comes from the majority language of the listener community of the country, from which the name of the Deaf community is often given a name with which it will begin to be recognized in the world. listener. This name will be constructed according to a language spoken by the majority community of the country in which each Deaf community is located (case of the names of the languages ​​of communities that I listed at the end of the initial paragraph of this article). Even if such a name is not imposed by the listeners, but created and adapted by the deaf themselves, the fact that the spoken language of the country is used for it makes it an entirely different case to that verified for the oral languages. .

The chosen name usually has a double manifestation: written, for which the alphabet and the rules of construction of the oral language that the name brings are used; and marked, for which the manual alphabet used by the Deaf community in question is used, and which usually consists of spelling the initials of the words that make up the name. The extension of both manifestations of the oral name of the language of each Deaf community will depend on different factors, such as the degree of evolution of the linguistic studies on that language, its diffusion, the level of social organization reached by the community and its ideological bias, etc.

As far as we know, the first time the language of a Deaf community received a special name in an oral language was the language of the French Deaf people of the 18th century, in the school of Abbot Charles Michel de I'Epée. This pedagogue-linguist referred to such language as "langage des signes naturelles" (Lane 1984, Stokoe 1978). From their example, and often as a correlate of similar educational efforts, the languages ​​of the Deaf from different parts of the world began to receive denominations such as "language des sourds-muets" (in French), "manual communication" (in English) ), "Linguaggio mimico-gestual" (Italian), "lugha ya alama (Swahili)," Taubstummsprache "(German), etc.

Nowadays, the unification of the criteria followed by the social sciences involved in the study of deafness has led to unifying also the terms used to name, in oral languages, the languages ​​of the deaf. This unification charges, in the western languages ​​that I know, the form of a nominal phrase composed of a noun that accounts for the linguistic nature of the code thus named:

    language,
    language (English),
    langue (French),
    lingua (Portuguese and Italian),
    Sprache (German), etc.

... and by one or two adjective elements that inform, respectively, the visuo-spatial character of the code:

    of signs,
    of signs sign (English),
    of signes (French),
    do sinais (Portuguese),
    dei segni (Italian),
    Gebärden (German), etc.

... more the place where the language comes from, which almost always corresponds to a nationality:

    Venezuelan,
    Colombian,
    Spanish
    British (English),
    American (North American),
    Française (French),
    Deutsche (German)

etc.

I go on to review one by one the meanings of each of the terms of the first two lists.
"Language or" language "?

In many studies on languages ​​of Deaf communities it is possible to find any of the two words of the subtitle in the place of the first element of the name of the languages ​​of the Deaf. Thus, for example, we speak of "Venezuelan Sign Language", but also of "Nicaraguan Sign Language".

Both words are terms of linguistic theory: "Language" means a specific system of signs that is used by a specific community to resolve their communicative situations. "Language", on the other hand, designates a unique capacity of the human species to communicate through sign systems. According to it, "language"




          refers to a skill that we inherit genetically and that allows us to build linguistic systems and use them in structuring our psyche and our culture. Such systems, which are not provided by nature, but by the evolution of human cultures, are "languages" (Saussure 1980: 51-2; Dubois 1979: 375-83).

Language, defined then as the human capacity to create and use languages ​​in a natural way, is the common heritage of the Deaf and Hearing, and underlies both the spoken and the spoken languages. The word "language" could replace "language" in this sense, since they have very similar values, and it is with "language" as a closely equivalent to the meaning that "language" has in linguistic theory is popularly codified. But in view of the fact that the majority of Western researchers have opted for "language", we are forced to follow in Spanish that general tendency to name the visuo-spatial codes of the deaf communities.

Hence, linguistically, it seems more appropriate to use the term "language" than "language" to designate the language of a particular Deaf community, since this is another version, another historical update of the universal capacity of the language .

In many languages ​​there are no two different terms for what in Spanish is "language" and "language". This is the case of English, the language in which most of the studies on the deaf and their languages ​​are written or translated. The English word "language", which is equivalent to our "language" and "language", nevertheless receives different translations in languages ​​that like Spanish do distinguish them with different words. It is enough to compare the numerous translations that exist in the specialized libraries to verify that in the languages ​​that reserve two terms for those two concepts, "sign language" is always translated as "sign language" or "sign language" (Cf. Volterra 1987, Ferreira Brito 1988a and b, Girod 1990).
"Gestual", "manual", "sign", "sign"?

The first adjective element of the names now used to designate the languages ​​of the Deaf usually receives one of the four forms presented in the previous subtitle. I'm going to refer to them one by one.

Gestual:

This adjective is etymologically related to the idea of ​​expressing certain meanings with the face, hands or body. That is, in general terms, applicable to the languages ​​of the Deaf. However, its use to designate the visuo-spatial languages ​​of these communities is hampered by the fact that the modern sense of "gestures" refers to the set of non-linguistic expressions that accompany speech in support of what has been said (Birdwhistell 1979; Meo-Zilio and Mejía 1983) and that do not conform a productive code, that is, they lack the possibility of constructing complex meanings. The languages ​​of the Deaf communities, on the other hand, that use the face, hands and body as articulators, are linguistic systems, capable of coding any kind of information.

Some linguists propose that in the speech deaf of the deaf, certain non-linguistic elements (the mimic used in stories, for example) that are qualified as "gestures" to distinguish them from the "signs", the properly linguistic elements of discourse (see Oviedo 2004 and Liddell 2003).

Manual:

This adjective, whose use has known an extension even greater than the previous one in the denomination of the languages ​​of the Deaf, has the disadvantage that it typifies these systems as based on the activity of the hands, obviating the importance that for such languages ​​the non-manual activity.

Many studies carried out on the grammar of the languages ​​of the Deaf show that the cohesion of discourse is articulated more in non-manual than in manual activity. In the Venezuelan Sign Language, as well as the Swedish, for example, it has been possible to observe how the direction of the gaze determines the substantive or verbal character of many signs, and that this same non-manual feature permanently defines the reference to the subjects objects of verbs (Oviedo 1996, Ahlgren and Bergman 1992). Other examples of the grammatical importance of non-manual traits are the studies on American Sign Language (ASL) conducted by Liddell (1980) on the functions of the position of the head in grammatical operations such as topicalization or subordination, and Wilbur's studies (1994) on the role of blinking in the same language as a marker of the structure of sentences





         Signs, signs:

These two Spanish words have a common origin, but a different story. "Sign" is a romance version of the Latin "signum", which passed to Spanish through cultured, while "sign", which derives from "signa", the plural of "signum", reached us through the spoken language , reason why it underwent the phonetic transformations to which its present form owes. The difference in the origin makes "sign" today have a wide range of uses in the spoken language, while "sign" is circumscribed rather to the social sciences to designate specifically the product of a social convention according to which a certain physical signal (a sound, a visual image, etc.) a certain meaning is linked. Accordingly, all the words of a language, whether spoken or pointed, are signs, so for a linguist, the phrase "sign language" would seem redundant.

 In 1989, when the language of the Venezuelan Deaf still had not received an official academic name, we had several discussions about it, and we chose to use the word "signs" and not "signs" due to the previous argument. Similar discussions also took place in Argentina, at the same time; and from 1995, when it was the turn of the Deaf language in Colombia. In all those cases, it was decided by Sign Language. " Not so, for example, in other countries such as Spain, where it was decided to use "sign language".

Languages ​​such as English or French, which do not count on both developments of the Latin "signum", invariably use their only version of that word: "sign" (in English); "Signe" (in French). The reason I use to prefer "signs" has to do with the greater diffusion that this word has reached in front of "signs" among linguists who have written about languages ​​of deaf communities in Spanish: Sign Language Argentina (Massone and Machado 1994) ; Uruguayan Sign Language (Behares et al., 1988); Venezuelan Sign Language (Oviedo 2004, Pietrosemoli 1989); Mexican Sign Language (Fridman 1996); Puerto Rican Sign Language (Laguna 1988), Costa Rican Sign Language -LESCO.

According to the arguments I have presented, linguistic theory and studies conducted in Spanish on the languages ​​of the deaf would support the use of the noun "language" and the phrase "of signs" to designate, in our language, the visual systems spaces of the deaf. To the sentence composed of these two elements would be added the adjective that designates the country or region in which the particular sign language to which we are referring has been developed: Colombian Sign Language, Venezuelan Sign Language, etc.

This, however, and as I have pointed out, varies from country to country. But, what really happens

 It is common that in the early days of the description of a sign language there are different variants in the denomination, in oral language, of the Deaf language of the country. This happened, to give a close example, in Venezuela, where since the eighties, when linguistic studies on the language of the Deaf in that country began, there were publications that spoke of "gestural language" (Fundaprosordo 1981) , "Venezuelan gestural language" (Sánchez 1987) or "Venezuelan Sign Language" (Pietrosemoli 1989). Today in Venezuela, in the academic environment we have agreed on the use of the last of those names, that of LSV, to call the language of our deaf compatriots, and that pattern follows post-1989 studies. Some deaf associations have followed that convention in recent years.

 The community of teachers of the Deaf schools, however, usually continues to prefer the old terms ("sign, hand language, sign language", etc.), and the Deaf, although they know the term LSV, is also not common use it Deaf communities seem to prefer to use a sign (which is translated into Spanish as "sign" or "sign") to name their language, and very little use of the academic name. When they do, they simply spell: LSV, LSE, LSC, etc.





is a matter that does not depend on the goodness of the term, but on the depth reached by the dissemination of studies, which in our countries, due to the scarce command of the written language that the Deaf have, unfortunately, is almost always limited to circles of specialists. But this is a point whose consideration exceeds the purposes of this article, and therefore I will leave here, but I thought it important to mention it so that Hispanic colleagues take it as a topic of reflection: they are the Deaf, in defined accounts, those who assume a particular denomination for their language. The specialists just suggest, and that has exactly been my intention here, the one that suggests.

References made in the text

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CRUZ, L. S. and P. RAMIREZ, 1995. "Research for the validation of a bilingual model Manual Colombian-Spanish for deaf children 0-5 years in Santafé de Bogotá". In: The bilingualism of the Deaf., Pgs. 5-7. Santafé de Bogotá, National Institute for the Deaf, (INSOR).

DUBOIS, J. 1979. Dictionary of Linguistics. Madrid, Alliance.

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        SANCHEZ, C. 1987. "The linguistic environment and the Venezuelan gestural language". Caracas, Ministry of Education (mimeo.).

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This article was originally published as A. Oviedo (1997) "" Sign language "," sign language? "," Sign language "," manual language "? Reasons to choose a denomination ". The bilingualism of the deaf (2), Bogotá: INSOR, pages. 7-11