Special Issue: Language Planning and Sign Language Rights

Abstract

Special Issue:Language Planning and Sign Language Rights Joseph J. Murray (bio) Sign languages exist throughout the world’s societies with varying degrees of acceptance and recognition. Sign languages have emerged as a result of the establishment of schools for deaf people as well as within shared signing communities with sign languages used by both deaf and hearing people. The past half century has witnessed remarkable growth in the academic study of sign languages around the world, an endeavor that has given scientific support to deaf communities’ advocacy for full acceptance of their sign languages by the societies in which they live. Some countries recognize national sign languages in legislation, whereas others do not. Language standardization can threaten sign languages used by a relatively small group of people by favoring a designated “national” sign language or attempts to impose an extranational signed lexicon to take the place of a naturally occurring national sign language (Adam, this volume). The theme of this special issue is “Language Planning and Sign Language Rights.” The six articles in it look at the intersections of language attitudes, public policy, and deaf community discourse at national, regional, and international levels. This is the second special issue of Sign Language Studies on the theme of language planning in sign languages in three years, following an issue in 2012 edited by Josep Quer and Ronice M. de Quadros. This issue comes in the context of widespread interest in sign language rights among academics and within the deaf community. A number of articles on language planning and sign language rights have appeared, as well as two books: Larry Siegel’s The Human Right to Language (2008) and Language Planning [End Page 375] in Sign Languages, by Timothy Reagan (2010), both published by Gallaudet University Press. This interest in sign language rights and sign language planning parallels campaigns by members of deaf communities to use sign language as a means of securing equality for deaf people in the societies in which they live. The late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth saw decades of struggle by organized deaf communities to undo misguided attempts to remove sign language from educational settings for deaf children. As I write in “Linguistic Human Rights Discourses in Deaf Community Activism,” the academic legitimacy conferred by sign language research shaped a new discourse on cultural and linguistic distinctiveness that deaf communities could use to advocate for sign language rights as a means of achieving equality in their societies. The movement for sign language rights has had to overcome the perception of sign languages as not real languages. Verena Krausneker, in “Ideologies and Attitudes toward Sign Languages: An Approximation,” writes that this is one of five ideological constructions that influence this mind-set. Others include the contention that sign languages are of limited value in an ostensibly hearing world, the problem of either/or attitudes of viewing deaf people either as having a disability or as a cultural minority, thereby characterizing both deaf people and sign language as economic burdens. In addition to these four negative frameworks Krausneker suggests that a fifth, positive, attitudinal framework can be found in the concept of Deaf Gain. Robert Adam, in his article, “Standardization of Sign Languages,” explores a particular form of corpus planning with regard to sign languages: language standardization. Although agreeing with previous scholars that such efforts have been led by hearing people or guided by priorities established by them, Adam also notes that some groups of deaf people have been involved in these attempts as well. Adams’s article gives examples of language standardization in Australia, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, and the Arab region. It explores arguments against language standardization by the World Federation of the Deaf and concludes that such efforts should be studied, with careful attention paid to the prime actors and to whether deaf communities’ [End Page 376] primacy in determining the use of their language has been taken into account in the process. A number of countries have recognized sign languages in various ways. Some have done so with a declaration by a government official that the national or regional sign language is indeed a language. Other forms of acknowledgment...