Signed Language Community‐Researcher Collaboration in Việt Nam: Challenging Language Ideologies, Creating Social Change

Abstract

Examining linguistic practices and description involved in signed language community‐ researcher collaboration in Việt Nam, this article contributes a case supporting analytic efforts to study the ways “people take up literacy for their own purposes” (Bialostok and Whitman 2006:390). Emerging at the juncture of national speech‐based Deaf education, one signed language–based education project, and Deaf community organizing, these collaborations coalesced in a political climate in which “signs” were construed as a compensatory system for “real” language (Woodward, Nguyễn, and Nguyễn 2004) and as “backward” relative to Vietnamese grammatical structure (Cooper 2014). Using original ethnographic data, microanalysis of two texts reveals that the ways presenters mobilize stances toward linguistic description and one another accrues legitimacy and authority for Deaf sociolinguistic knowledge and Deaf agency while implicitly challenging prevailing language ideologies and hierarchies. Discussion centers on processes of legitimation of Deaf social voices, language invention/disinvention, interpretation/translation, and the significance of ethnography to the present analysis.