A Discussion about the population on Martha's Vineyard, who for 250 years had a large proportion of congenitally deaf people. This led to everyone learning sign language. Deafness was not seen as a disability in any way.
My Grandparents on my mother’s side were both deaf. They lost their hearing through working in a noisy factory, so they had learned spoken language. This is called post lingual deafness, even if you lose your hearing at the age of 3 (this used to be common and was associated a condition called Scarlett Fever). At the age of 3 most people have learned a lot of spoken language, because the brain is in advance of the vocal cords.
There are some people who are born without any hearing, so called pre lingual deafness and this poses a problem because spoken language is far more difficult to develop but is a fundamental way we learn. To learn to speak without hearing their own voice is the only way forward and can only be gauged by lip reading and feeling another persons throat (this is how Helen Keller learned to speak, even though she was both blind and deaf). This kind of learned speech can be quite difficult to understand and so many deaf people use sign language. The best people at this are often the pre lingually deaf because they will start using sign language from the get go. In fact young children are able to develop their nervous system so that their grammar in sign becomes far superior to anything that you or I can learn but they learn it instinctively and become better than those that have taught them, very quickly.
Sign language has an advantage over spoken language because with the voice, we listen in time but with sign, it is using both time and space and this has huge value in the way that deaf people can express themselves.
I find it quite staggering that in 1880 an international conference for educators of the deaf was held in Milan, only attended by hearing people, where sign language was banned as a form of education.
This lead to 100 years of sign language being suppressed in education, often forcing people who had sign language, not to use it. This created a situation of isolation and exclusion for many deaf people.
The only way I can think to express this is to mention the scene in the Film 4 weddings and a funeral where in the church, David, Charles’s brother seeks to speak to Charles but they use sign language. We the audience have to listen to Charles translation which leads to his bride punching him in the eye. There is a combination of comedy and shock but the shock extends to us being excluded because most of us cannot understand sign.
Sign language is a massive thing. You can go and see an Italian Sign Language version of Hamlet or a Russian signing of Oedipus, but we don’t often see deaf actors in film, which is sad.
One place where the deaf were not excluded was on an Island off the East Coast of the US called Martha’s Vineyard in Massachussets. For 250 years there were a significant number of the population with congenital deafness and in the mid 19thcentury 1 in 4 people were deaf. So the whole population learned sign language MVSL (martha’s vineyard sign language). There was no stigma to being deaf or as they often phrased it Deaf and Dum. The term Dum is seen as an insult but wasn’t on Martha' Vineyard.
During the 90s, the last of the congenitally deaf population had either left the island or had died but Oliver Sacks interviewed some of the older inhabitants, just to find out what they were like. The thing that struck him was seeing four old people sitting on a verander talking to each other and would drop into sign language and would then come out of sign and start talking again. Far from the use of sign being for deaf people he found that there were clear uses for it that were superior to spoken language so being deaf was not part of the equation. The fact that there was no stigma and all were considered equal with no disability was seen when he talked about people from their past. He asked about someone called Ebeneezer and the response was OH yes, he was a fisherman, a scholar and a prankster. He then had to prompt and say "Yes but was he deaf?"
The people would thing for a long while and say, come to think of it he was Deaf AND Dum, but no-one ever thought of it, he was just the same as everybody else.
There are still places in the world, usually isolated, where populations speak using sign language. In Bengkala in the highlands of North Bali, very few people will take the treacherous 2 hour journey to get there and so there is a 3000 strong population that have a 1:50 deaf population. Everyone there learns the sign language Kata Kolok which means deaf talk in Indonesian. They can only communicate with each other because their sign language is unlike any other.
It is interesting to think that sign language for some is their first or only language and for others it is a second language which can be used either to speak with the deaf population or with hearing people to emphasise a point that cannot be expressed with the spoken word. There are signs that don’t have a parallel in spoken language. But for those without speech, there is a fundamental importance to sign because it becomes the way that one thinks. Without any language this consigns people to an inability to learn anything and is more disabling than deafness ever should be. One of the Martha’s Vineyard residents would often be seen looking down and her hand movements would look like she was knitting, until her daughter would point out that she was thinking and not only this but during sleep, would make movements of her fingers against the counterpain on her bed indicating that she was dreaming.
Our very thoughts are intrinsically linked to language and our ability to learn is also deeply ingrained around language but our ability to communicate can change. For someone who has lost their voice simple sign language can easily get meaning across such as I am hungry or I need the bathroom.
So while sign language has been lost now on Martha’s Vineyard, there is now a movement to reintroduce it because even though there are not many deaf people living there any more, they see the importance of a cultural icon that they have lost!