There's an interesting article in the Green Bay Press Gazette today about a "sign language" developed over the last hundred or so years in a lumberyard on the Menominee reservation. I put "sign language" in quotes because my first smart-arse reaction was to doubt it. Bloody hearing people. It's probably cultural appropriation. Or something. I dunno. However, while I entirely expect that it is not as sophisticated or fleshed out as sign languages evolving over thousands of years within large Deaf communities, it certainly meets all of Hockett's "essential characteristics"* of human languages that BSL or ASL does, and it is certainly an interesting thing!

“It sprung up organically through the force of several generations of workers struggling to make themselves understood in the noisy environment of a sawmill over the last 110 years, and it’s something to behold.”

— Paul Srubas, Green Bay Press Gazette, April 5th 2018

Apparently nobody has ever studied it, or done any more than one or two little press-pieces about it. I think it would be a wonderful opportunity to produce a unique piece of linguistic research. An interview with a couple of generations would cover the entire language history.

Their sign for 'drunk' looks great too.

* Hockett, Charles F. (1960), "The Origin of Speech," Scientific American, 203, 89–97.

There's a nice little summary piece in USA Today about Gallaudet University's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute. It emphasises entrepreneurship as a solution to the discrimination faced by Deaf people in the jobs market.

“It’s very important that it’s not just deaf people helping deaf people,” Soukup said. “It’s about deaf people making a meaningful contribution to the world, and the world recognizing that.”

— Chris Soukup in USA Today, April 3rd 2018

Read the whole article here.

This is a lot more interesting than it sounds:

“This study confirms that second-generation deaf children exceed deaf children of hearing parents in terms of cochlear implantation performance. Encouraging deaf children to communicate in sign language from a very early age, before cochlear implantation, appears to improve their ability to learn spoken language after cochlear implantation.”

See?! As illustrated in The Silent Child, and it isn't news, parents are sometimes told that encouraging sign language will adversely effect the development of other languages like spoken English. This is counter-intuitive as much as it is simply and demonstrably wrong, and this paper demonstrates it very elegantly:

“Both groups of children showed auditory and speech development. However, the second-generation deaf children (i.e. deaf children of deaf parents) exceeded the cochlear implantation performance of the deaf children with hearing parents.”

— The Journal of Laryngology & Otology (2012), 126, 989–994.

You can access the full journal article here. 

Rinkoo Barpaga gave this great talk at the Creative Multilingual Identities Conference in February.

In this presentation, he discusses the different sign languages he knows, the development of Urban Sign Language among ethnic minority deaf people, and language barriers he's encountered. His presentation style is tremendous. I'd love to work with him!

(Thanks to Elvire Roberts for pointing this out.)

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an extremely important and powerful piece of European legislation, which the UK has signed up to but which we appear to be determined to ignore.

The full text of the Convention is here. The Articles clearly referring to sign language are Articles 2, 9, 21, 24, and 30. 

It is a legally binding document that defines sign language as a right, and also highlights the need for the eradication of physical, social, financial, political and attitudinal barriers. 

There is a protocol, all of which the UK has signed up to.

The flaw, as always, is that it is a legal document that protects oppressed and voiceless people from being kept oppressed and voiceless, but only if those oppressed and voiceless people know about it and have the energy and resources to take their local authority, school, or hospital trust to court in a likely escalating series of hearings.

So the other thing the Deaf Community could do with is legal representation from somebody willing to take such a case on. Do you know of such a person?

Nina Thomas' article in Limping Chicken today is absolutely spot on.

“I worry that people mistake awareness for change. The challenges facing d/Deaf people right now are very complex and the changes needed are serious and important”

— Nina Thomas

She points out that the Monday after The Silent Child won its Oscar, the British government blocked the proposal to teach BSL at GCSE level in schools. It reminded me of an interesting occasion when John Kerry visited Ethiopia, and said in a press conference "we remain committed to our partnership with Ethiopia..." etc. An Ethiopian journalist asked him, "Is it lip-service, or are you seriously concerned...?" Kerry was flustered because in everyday English "serious" really means "not joking". This is interesting linguistically because in East Africa "are you serious" means "are you doing something about this, or is it just words?" It is a clear and I think helpful distinction between words and actions that we should all be very clear about. Radiolab cover this very nicely (no transcript, I'm afraid). 

There is a meaningful difference between taking something seriously and acting to fix it, and English and our politics endemically confounds the words with the actions.

Deaf people do not need lip-service. They need a hand.