Dr Winford James
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Sign language - as natural as human speech

By Dr. Winford James
May 23, 2004


I am a student of human language, spoken and written, wherever in the world it is used, but the subject is so vast that, pragmatically, I have had to delimit and focus on Englishes and Creoles and the interaction between them. This bias to spoken and written Englishes and Creoles is due in large measure to the fact that academia has not, until recently, seen natural language as being more than spoken and written. We now know, far more than we did in the 20th century, that there is another kind of natural language - sign language. Unfortunately, it hasn't fallen under my focus, so I'm uncomfortably ignorant about its constitution. But I have read some of the literature, so I can make some, hopefully useful, comments about it.

The linguist David Perlmutter is one of those who have studied the phenomenon, and what I say in this column reflects his views in large part. Essentially, he holds as follows:

What has been discovered over the past half century is that sign language is language. This is not just a discovery about sign language; it is a discovery about language itself. It reveals human language to be more flexible than had been imagined, able to exist in either auditory or visual form. It shows that the human drive for language is so strong that when deafness makes speech inaccessible, it finds another channel, creating language in sign. Sign language has taught us that human language can use either channel - speech or sign. It is a living testament to the fact that language is what we all need to be human.
The quote assumes that there is a distinction between language and speech. Speech is a manifestation of language; and so is sign. Language is therefore the ability to send and receive message in speech and sign, and, critically, it is part of the biological endowment of each of us that is given substance by and in society.

Just as we have American English, British English, Caribbean English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and all the other kinds of speech that reflect our linguistic endowment in interaction with society, we also have American Sign Language, French Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, Taiwan Sign Language, Brazilian Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, Jamaican Sign Language, Trinidadian Sign Language (yes!), and many other Sign Languages. Just as the speech languages develop in communities of hearing people in the different societies where they are spoken, so the sign languages develop in communities of Deaf people within those societies.

Each of the sign languages is a language in its own right, and each has developed independently. For example, American Sign Language is structurally different from British Sign Language, just as American English is different from British English. Each sign language developed within a different social framework and therefore has a different vocabulary and a different grammar.

For a long time, it was felt in English academia that sign language was just a way to express English words - a kind of substitute for speech; and there are many people, but mostly outside academia, who still think that way. Further, because many thoughts are expressed differently in ASL and in English, many think sign is an ungrammatical form of English. But, as I have shown in respect of structural comparisons between English and Creole, speech English is a language in its own right and sign English is a language in its own right as well. It is a question of different ways or channels of forming message.

How is sign language different from speech language? Let's compare English and American Sign Language (ASL). In English, the word 'right' has at least two meanings: 'the opposite of wrong' and 'the opposite of left'. But in ASL, there is no one sign with these two meanings. They are expressed by two different signs, just as they are expressed by two different words in languages like French, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese. Like the words of other languages, ASL signs express meanings, not English words.

Some of the things English says in multiple words are expressed in a single sign in ASL. The meanings in sentences such as 'I ask her', 'She asks me', 'I ask her for a long time', and 'She asks me for a long time', are expressed by single signs of varying orientations and directions of the hand.

Another difference between English and ASL can be seen in the way they handle yes-no questions (i.e., questions that require either a 'no' or a 'yes' as the answer). In English, to change a statement into a question, one has to change the word order, as in 'She was there' becoming 'Was she there'. But in ASL, the statement and the question will have same signs in the same order. The difference between a statement and a question is shown on the face. When a yes-no question is signed, the eyebrows are raised. (Indeed, in ASL conversation, signers do not watch each other's hands, but, rather, maintain eye contact, watching each other's faces. They get all the information conveyed through the hands through their peripheral vision.)

The differences between English and ASL are proof that ASL was not modeled on English but developed within the American Deaf community. Other sign languages have developed in their own Deaf communities. Communities, differentially structured as they are, are responsible for developing their own ways of making message as constrained by language templates in the brain.

This is good news if only in allowing us to see that the Deaf may not have speech but they have language which they manifest in sign. Sign is analogous to speech - in vocabulary and grammar.


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