Excellent article which I’ll re-read again (time limit now.) I agree with the many points presented, about preserving linguistic rights of folks using ASL. More work needs to be done to save, protect, & empower our ASL. I have an adult deaf blind son, living independently, & ASL is his native language, & also his young son’s language as well. We’ve battled with “hearing systems” for years who try to Lord it over the Deaf and make them lip-read & speak, so annoying.

I like the Dylan Thomas quote you used at the end of your article.

The fact is that the people who would come together to discuss this (and come together in a string of comments after reading this article) are already the people who CARE, and the divide between those who gather and those who basically DON’T and don’t prioritize gathering and the community is the void that really worries me.

Good luck with your sequel and I hope people contribute more ideas about ways to make community links.

Best,
Lynnette

ASL is very alive and strong as are many world sign languages. I did not mean to write an epitaph on the language and culture, but rather to question our ethical and human responsibility for the welfare of a language and community.

I do think the key for us is to create physical spaces for language interaction. It is only in this way that intergenerational links can happen for those who are not born into a deaf family, or a family with sign language as the heritage language. It may not be the same for you in Finland, but here, the community has given way to the individual and without the sites to gather and share, the transmission link becomes weak.

We also have to look at systemic obstacles. If we make ethics the foundation of our interpreting practice and organization then all decisions would have to refer back to the essential question, ‘will this do harm to our community, to the health and wellbeing of our community and language?’ With that question in mind, we would have to examine our agreements, our certification, our testing system, the direction and pacts of our Interpreting organization and our choices as individual practicioners.

Thanks again-
Lynnette

There is much that minority (spoken and signed) language communities can learn from each other. I’m working on a research team that is investigating similar discourses that circulate within indigenous spoken language communities in Northern Finland, Wales, Ireland, and Corsica where questions such as these arise:

1. What counts as a language?
2. Who counts as a signer/speaker of a language?
3. Who owns the language? (Dan raised this question in his response.)

Furthermore, who decides the answers to these questions? See Moore, Pietikäinen & Bloomaert (2010): http://tilburguniversity.academia.edu/JanBlommaert/Papers/1458467/counting_the_losses_numbers_as_the_discourse_of_endangered_language_2010_pdf

For those interested in reading up on language maintenance efforts, I’d suggest Joshua Fishman’s work (2001: http://books.google.fi/books?id=oScUXmAkRXIC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fi&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false). He proposes a framework (family-community-school-work) to promote language maintenance and reverse language. He argues that the key to language maintenance is intergenerational transmission. And while on-line communities can support homes and communities in their efforts to maintain a language, virtual spaces cannot replace physical spaces created within homes and communities.

Graham Turner wrote an article on preserving heritage signed languages: Turner, G. H. (2006). Why protect heritage sign language? International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 16(3), 409-413.

Hill wrote a compelling article in 2002 cautioning academics to reflect on the rhetoric used when framing languages: http://www.rnld.org/sites/default/files/Hill%202002.pdf
Framing (signed) languages as endangered languages can backfire. In my own research, I’ve had parents tell me that their doctors have told them not so sign with their children because “it’s a dying language”.

Considering educational placement decisions, while the dominant interpretation of LRE is to place kids in inclusion settings, the communication needs provision in IDEA, as well as plenty of policy guidelines issued by the Dept. of Education, have created implementational spaces that support placement in multimodal-multilingual environments. See Hornberger, N. (2005). Opening and Filling Up Implementational and Ideological Spaces in Heritage Language Education. Modern Language Journal 89(4): 605–609 as well as Hult, F. & Compton, S. (2012). Deaf education policy as language policy: A comparative analysis of Sweden and the United States. Sign Language Studies, 12(4), 602-620.

Readers may also find Grosjean’s efforts to raise awareness of issues surrounding multilingualism, and bimodal-bilingualism in particular, of interest: http://www.francoisgrosjean.ch/ His article (2010) Bilingualism, biculturalism, and deafness. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(2), 133-145 is currently the #1 read article in this journal.

Lastly, it’s important to consider the state of immigrant signed languages within our communities. ASL is a minority language when compared with dominant spoken languages in the US. And yet it is also the majority signed language in the U.S.

Thank you all for your insightful comments! And thank you again, Lynnette, for creating a space for us to flesh out the points you raised in your article.

With my best,

Sarah

SO nice to hear from you. SF is always in my heart and I still call it home. Yes, mom passed away recently. Life is not as bright without her. She was a force of nature and a poet of life.
Thanks for reaching out. Makes my heart happy-
ILY Lynnette