When I said 'colonialism', I meant something along the lines of 'that process of domination and assimiliation and moreso depreciation of minorities', if that makes sense. Like, when it comes to sign language, the position is still precarious. It is, in some very real ways, a finite resource. And I'm very aware of that.
I immediately thought of you, today, during my introductory lecture on Linguistic Field Methods - discussing elicitation of primary linguistic data, language samples from people to whom that language is native, the discussion of the process talks about "spoken/written/signed" language and native "speakers/signers".
This, to me, seems like a good sign (no pun intended). Admittedly, linguists overall seem to tend to be kind of progressive ideologically, at least in terms of ideas about language (or it could just be the ones I know), but at the same time a lot of general ideas about language do seem to manage to filter out from the scientists to general perception. And it seems that linguists are now just treating signed languages as having equivalency with spoken and written languages.
(I confess I'm hoping that the language we're working with is oral, because I have a shoulder injury that means signed language is beyond me.)
And I'm aware that hearing parents would rather perform invasive surgery on their child rather than learn to communicate with them as they are. And then when that fails, as it did with me off and on over the years in a thousand different ways, they brand their child 'failures' and send them off to learn sign language because they'll never be any good at oral communication, when the delay in language and development is caused by the insistence on that surgery and the following expectation that they'll learn oral language.
See, this, I agree is a total problem for a range of reasons.
The biggest one is probably tha, yes, delay in language development is going to be a problem if you have a child who has hearing difficulties of any kind - even if it is possible for them to (re)gain hearing via medical intervention, you're losing valuable time in their development if you don't give them a language then. Evidence suggests that it can be good for kids to teach them some sign language (lower case deliberate - not ASL, necessarily) regardless of how well they can hear, simply because oral language articulation and production is seriously complicated, and children can communicate gesturally long before they can do so orally. Motor control of hands and arms develops early. Speaking requires much, much finer control of complicated systems, including the brain's learning to synchronise signals along nerve paths that are of drastically different lengths, so the signals need to be sent with staged timing to make the relevant parts to operate at the same time.
After a certain point the ability of the child to catch up entirely will never quite be there.
And that is the position manual languages are in and have been in living memory (very recent memory: I myself am a product of the denial of manual languages, of this attitude, this is my pain, this is where my hurt and my rage comes from) and while I wish dearly that it could happen, that this is a world where it will eventually happen, I can't make that assumption.
I see where you're coming from. I now suspect we have different approaches to activism. For me, there's an element of: Sign language is a language, which means it should get everything other languages get.
The people who should know better and don't? Fuck 'em. Let them choke on their own stupidity, just leave them behind. The people who haven't had a chance to learn yet? Give them no chance to think it's less than it is.
Your approach seems, for want of a better word, defensive. I can understand that, but it's not how I roll, on anything. I aim for pride, for projecting confidence even if I don't have it - if I were to try and sum up my ethos on stuff like this, it more-or-less amounts to "fake it till you make it", because in my experience, if you act like you deserve better, as if the idea of being disrespected hadn't occurred to you because you couldn't imagine anyone would be so stupid as to think demeaning you on the ground of [thing] was even a possibility, people tend to fall in line.
So I want it to be that if people tried to suggest that sign language wasn't a real language, everyone would be in a position to look at them like they crawled out from under a rock and wave shelves of literature in their faces.
Or possibly ebooks of it - it occurs to me that, in the modern age, a sign language orthography could be digital and animated, and therefore risk losing a lot less while still encoding language in a less data-heavy way than streaming video.
The point being that, where possible, one way to overcome the oppression of such things is just to win by their rules.
And then, if people aren't giving their deaf children access to the language, access to all of this, if nothing else you get a sudden strong case to call it neglect. And when people don't have responsibilities to any deaf people themselves, and make asshole assumptions, you can look at them witheringly. Spread the meme that this is equivalent to thinking French isn't a "real language".
I know your position. I fight with it all the time. And I'm fighting with it because I want you to understand that your position is of a piece, is an ally to, is working against me, is contributing to my struggle, with the positions and attitudes that denied me the language you are so intent on preserving in the first place.
Okay.
I'm sorry it comes across that way. I don't intend it to be like that - it's possibly partly, even mostly, that I do come at this from the perspective of a linguist, where it's taken as a safe assumption that the person who can best document a language is someone to whom it's not native, because native status in a language entails serious biases. (This is why a lot of the important work on describing English, for example, was done by French and German scientists.
At this juncture, though, I feel strongly I should quell my tendency to enthusiasm.
no subject
I immediately thought of you, today, during my introductory lecture on Linguistic Field Methods - discussing elicitation of primary linguistic data, language samples from people to whom that language is native, the discussion of the process talks about "spoken/written/signed" language and native "speakers/signers".
This, to me, seems like a good sign (no pun intended). Admittedly, linguists overall seem to tend to be kind of progressive ideologically, at least in terms of ideas about language (or it could just be the ones I know), but at the same time a lot of general ideas about language do seem to manage to filter out from the scientists to general perception. And it seems that linguists are now just treating signed languages as having equivalency with spoken and written languages.
(I confess I'm hoping that the language we're working with is oral, because I have a shoulder injury that means signed language is beyond me.)
And I'm aware that hearing parents would rather perform invasive surgery on their child rather than learn to communicate with them as they are. And then when that fails, as it did with me off and on over the years in a thousand different ways, they brand their child 'failures' and send them off to learn sign language because they'll never be any good at oral communication, when the delay in language and development is caused by the insistence on that surgery and the following expectation that they'll learn oral language.
See, this, I agree is a total problem for a range of reasons.
The biggest one is probably tha, yes, delay in language development is going to be a problem if you have a child who has hearing difficulties of any kind - even if it is possible for them to (re)gain hearing via medical intervention, you're losing valuable time in their development if you don't give them a language then. Evidence suggests that it can be good for kids to teach them some sign language (lower case deliberate - not ASL, necessarily) regardless of how well they can hear, simply because oral language articulation and production is seriously complicated, and children can communicate gesturally long before they can do so orally. Motor control of hands and arms develops early. Speaking requires much, much finer control of complicated systems, including the brain's learning to synchronise signals along nerve paths that are of drastically different lengths, so the signals need to be sent with staged timing to make the relevant parts to operate at the same time.
After a certain point the ability of the child to catch up entirely will never quite be there.
And that is the position manual languages are in and have been in living memory (very recent memory: I myself am a product of the denial of manual languages, of this attitude, this is my pain, this is where my hurt and my rage comes from) and while I wish dearly that it could happen, that this is a world where it will eventually happen, I can't make that assumption.
I see where you're coming from. I now suspect we have different approaches to activism. For me, there's an element of: Sign language is a language, which means it should get everything other languages get.
The people who should know better and don't? Fuck 'em. Let them choke on their own stupidity, just leave them behind. The people who haven't had a chance to learn yet? Give them no chance to think it's less than it is.
Your approach seems, for want of a better word, defensive. I can understand that, but it's not how I roll, on anything. I aim for pride, for projecting confidence even if I don't have it - if I were to try and sum up my ethos on stuff like this, it more-or-less amounts to "fake it till you make it", because in my experience, if you act like you deserve better, as if the idea of being disrespected hadn't occurred to you because you couldn't imagine anyone would be so stupid as to think demeaning you on the ground of [thing] was even a possibility, people tend to fall in line.
So I want it to be that if people tried to suggest that sign language wasn't a real language, everyone would be in a position to look at them like they crawled out from under a rock and wave shelves of literature in their faces.
Or possibly ebooks of it - it occurs to me that, in the modern age, a sign language orthography could be digital and animated, and therefore risk losing a lot less while still encoding language in a less data-heavy way than streaming video.
The point being that, where possible, one way to overcome the oppression of such things is just to win by their rules.
And then, if people aren't giving their deaf children access to the language, access to all of this, if nothing else you get a sudden strong case to call it neglect. And when people don't have responsibilities to any deaf people themselves, and make asshole assumptions, you can look at them witheringly. Spread the meme that this is equivalent to thinking French isn't a "real language".
I know your position. I fight with it all the time. And I'm fighting with it because I want you to understand that your position is of a piece, is an ally to, is working against me, is contributing to my struggle, with the positions and attitudes that denied me the language you are so intent on preserving in the first place.
Okay.
I'm sorry it comes across that way. I don't intend it to be like that - it's possibly partly, even mostly, that I do come at this from the perspective of a linguist, where it's taken as a safe assumption that the person who can best document a language is someone to whom it's not native, because native status in a language entails serious biases. (This is why a lot of the important work on describing English, for example, was done by French and German scientists.
At this juncture, though, I feel strongly I should quell my tendency to enthusiasm.