When One of Your Languages is not Recognized as a Language at all

Abstract

In the last 100 years attitudes towards deaf people and sign languages have changed drastically. During this time the deaf gradually became more visible in society: from the mid-eighteenth century an interest in sign languages began to develop, and in the middle of the nineteenth century education for the deaf began. In these early days deaf education could be described as bilingual, sign language being the medium of instruction. For the deaf this meant the emergence of a strong national and international network for the Deaf¹ community. Deaf culture flourished until the time of oralism, which began in the late nineteenth century and lasted to the 1970s. Oralism is an educational system based on the view that the teaching of speech enables deaf people to become normal, thus reflecting the medical view on deafness which sees it as a condition to be cured. Signing was excluded from education because it was considered a form of gesturing that would hinder children from learning speech, thus — it was believed — preventing them from gaining a full human status.