Another kind of Multiculturalism
The school I work at is right next to a centre for deaf and hearing-impaired people, so when I took the bus home tonight (well, technically to Biku's Skybox, but it's my Toronto Home -- which is uber-awesome) I was surrounded for half an hour by people all talking in sign language. And for the first time I saw ASL not as people talking to each other in a derivative sign-system created to replace English, but as a whole other language that's exactly the same as me being surrounded by people chatting in Hindi or Farsi or Cantonese. There was a young Indian girl, an old African Man, a woman looking at a Canadian citizenship form, a guy chuckling loudly as the women made some scandalous remarks -- it was a whole subculture which I had never really understood the true value of for people who are extraordinarily isolated most of their lives. And for half an hour, I had the privilege of being right in the middle of their world.
posted by bento at 5:17 PM
9 Comments:
I don't know if I told you this before, but I have a friend who taught her baby a child's form of sign language. The baby could communicate with this language before she could speak. My friend did it not because the baby had any problems, but simply because it allowed her to communicate with her baby earlier than she could otherwise have done - I suppose signing is easier for an infant than speaking.
Anyways, it was so cool being around and seeing her sign to her parents that she wanted food, or had to go to the washroom, or wanted to see the dog - just awesome.
7:00 PM
I also think it's really neat that sign language is universal across all cultures and countries - though I believe I read somewhere different regions have naturally developed different "dialects".
7:01 PM
I once flipped through an ASL book in Chapters whose introduction included the phrase "Now you too can enter the wonderful world of Deaf people!"
Geoff - Not universal at all, actually. The sign languages of different regions are different languages altogether, not just dialects. There are hundreds of them, generally mutually unintelligible. The current Wikipedia entry for "sign language" is a pretty good discussion of the state of things.
6:45 AM
Geoff: What kinds of signs did your friend teach her baby? and how?
11:50 AM
I also have a friend who taught her child some signs so he could communicate what he wanted, and it worked pretty well--until he reached the point where he should have started speaking but wasn't, and didn't bother: he was just relying on the signs to do the work for him. That caused a moment of panic but he's since started talking so I suppose all's well that ends well.
12:29 PM
kenso - Heh, guess I was wrong on the whole "universal sign language" thing. Thanks for pointing this out :)
francesca - The signs were pretty simplistic, just for basic things - I believe it was a modified form of ASL. She taught her baby by giving the baby the object in question while signing it herself. Eventually, as babies are wont to do, the baby would imitiate her mother, and soon learned to do it on her on. Pretty cool.
biku - When I was talking to my friend, she was saying that a lot of parents whom she had talked with about signing were worried about that exact thing - their babies learning language later than non-sign-taught babies. However, she looked into it, and found studies had shown that this didn't happen: basically, learning sign language was just like learning another language. I can see why the parents would be worried, though.
1:17 PM
They've noticed the same thing with babies raised in (spoken) bilingual households: their speech development tends to be slower than average in one or both languages, but then they start to catch up and by age three to five are on par with their monolingual peers. So I guess it makes sense that it works out the same way whether the languages are spoken or signed.
8:16 AM
Holy Moly! I can never really predict what random posts will set off a firestorm of comments. And I've learned all sorts of cool things about sign language. thanks, minna!
5:36 PM
I'm hopefully (cross fingers) going to be starting a sign language class at the MacKay Centre in January. Depending on the state of my finances and the schedule of whatever job I end up with in the new year, of course. I miss studying a language and this place is way cheaper than doing night classes at McGill, the Berlitz centre, etc. because it's so heavily government-subsidised. And it would just be cool.
6:50 AM
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