Are Sign Languages Inherently More Honest Than Spoken Ones?
Visual grammar, Deaf culture and the idea of a universal language
The common room at the retreat is full of people, but silence reigns. Twenty minutes in, and out of nowhere, twelve people burst out laughing.
No, it’s not a silent retreat, it’s a signing retreat, and only three people there are not Deaf.
My American Sign Language (ASL) and Linguistics professor is hearing, the partner of a Deaf person is hearing and I am hearing, but I’m the only one who is dumb.
I’m in my second semester learning ASL and I’m completely out of my depth.
I’m having flashbacks to age twelve, plonked in a lycée in Paris with barely a word of French and sniggeringly called “La bête Anglaise” by my classmates. (The English primitive).
Now, as then, my brain is quickly overloaded trying to comprehend and it switches off, I tune out — until the laughter wakes me up.
I chose to ‘say’ dumb back there to illustrate how hard it is to talk and write about deafness or sign language with ‘vocabulary’ that is not hearing- biased. (I’ll be putting quotes around more examples throughout this article.) I could have written ‘I’m the only one who is handicapped’.
