An American island where the language of the deaf was more important than English

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

How could a society look like, where people with disabilities are included in common life, making the environment accessible only because it is normal not to allow everyday life to belittle human dignity - a tradition and a common thing? History knows the answer to this question. In the nineteenth century in the United States, there was an island called Martha's Vineyard, where the deaf and dumb were included in the general life, like nowhere else.

Children who did not want to learn in any way

In 1817, an educational enthusiast named Thomas Gallodet founded the American School for the Deaf, the first in the New World. To organize her work, he traveled to France and studied the local sign language and the structure of classes using this language. He dreamed of implementing all this in his homeland, but he ran into a problem.

They began to bring students to school - some were paid for by their parents, for others - by benefactors. And some of these students, to put it mildly, did not succeed in learning progressive French sign language. When children used sign language in communication with teachers, they constantly did it wrong, as if they could not remember the correct words. But the children communicated with each other perfectly - and also with the help of gestures. Apparently, their conversations were sometimes long and difficult, it was more than an invitation to play or gesture jokes.

The fact is that a group of students who were not taught sign language from France were from the island of Martha's Vineyard. The island, which has had its own developed speech for a long time. Children were used to expressing their thoughts with it and it was difficult for them to relearn as quickly as those children for whom French sign language was the only way to communicate with peers at school. They didn't "use gestures wrong." They involuntarily switched to their native language.

In the end, reason and patriotism won out, and teachers at school (as well as other students) enriched French sign language with words and expressions from the native American Martha's Vineyard, and therefore American sign language differs from its progenitor, although the dumb American and French are still easier to understand each other than the British. But the specialty of Martha's Vineyard was not just that its deaf inhabitants were able to develop complex sign language. Its peculiarity was that, although most of the inhabitants of the island were not dumb or deaf, the sign language in it was not just one of the main, but, perhaps, dominant.

Either kinship or curse

The first settlers of the island in the northwestern United States were whalers, and for a long time this profession remained the main one for the inhabitants. The name of the island, however, was not given by them - back in the seventeenth century, the British traveler Bartholomew Gosnold named it in honor of his early deceased daughter, Martha's Vineyard. Or in honor of the mother-in-law, her grandmother. They were namesakes.

Of course, people lived on the island, the Wampanoag people, but the white colonists pushed them very seriously - some moved to other areas inhabited by the Wampanoag, some were killed in clashes, some died from diseases brought from Europe. In the eighteenth century, the island's population was already almost one hundred percent white. In the same century, a full-fledged sign language spread among him.

Either it was in unsuccessful marriages between cousins and cousins, or (as they sometimes said) in the Indian curse, but already in the eighteenth century, a significant part of the inhabitants of the island were deaf. Significant does not mean majority. There were so many deaf that they could be ignored, as was often done with minorities in other areas and lands. But something went wrong at Martha's Vineyard, and an inclusive culture unique to the eighteenth century developed. It was not easy for the deaf here to fully participate in public life, from gatherings of townspeople to doing business, from getting married to getting hired for any job.

The language developed so much not just because there were enough deaf people - but because all the inhabitants of the island spoke in it as in the main. That is, in a company where there were only hearing people, people spoke English. But if even one of those present was deaf, everyone immediately switched to sign language, usually accompanying them with English.

In addition, the islanders communicated in sign language in situations where visibility was bearable and audibility was almost zero, for example, during bad weather at sea. We switched to sign language and when it was necessary to "whisper" so that no one would hear. With sign language, the children of Vinyard put on Christmas performances, they switched to sign language during negotiations with outsiders, when it was necessary to quickly confer. People who lost their hearing from old age completely switched to communication with gestures. Even in families where there was no deaf person, everyone knew sign language.

It turns out that sign speech, firstly, was known to everyone, and secondly, it was actually used as the main one - they switched to pure English only in a suitable situation. Simply because it is not normal for someone to feel uncomfortable in a common company.

Where did Martha's Vinyard language go?

As already mentioned, islanders' sign language has greatly influenced the development of modern American sign language. Martha's Vineyard language is one of the maternal languages for Amslen (that is, modern sign language in the United States). However, on Martha's Vineyard itself, no one speaks it for a long time.

Of course, this was due to the fact that the island began to live a more open life in the first half of the twentieth century. They began to send officials and specialists from regions in which sign language was not known outside the deaf community. From the island itself, young people began to leave - and sometimes return with young wives from other cities and states or children from a failed marriage. As a result, fewer and fewer deaf people were born, and even less “incomprehensible” conversations were supported at the official level.

Today, the island's few deaf residents use common American sign language, and communicate with the hearing through text. Modern technologies even make it possible to instantly voice everything that you write on the phone in a special program, just as you write, so that there is no more misunderstanding due to poor eyesight of the interlocutor.

And in our time there are those who think that people want to communicate. Miracles in Our Hands: Neighbors Learned Sign Language to Surprise a Deaf Guy.