Linguistic Human Rights Discourse in Deaf
Community Activism
The past three decades of activism for linguistic human rights
(Skutnabb-Kangas 2000) have witnessed examples of language planning
by various national and supranational actors in national and international
spaces, with an exchange of ideas and strategies employed
by national, regional, and worldwide organizations. In many countries
a key goal of deaf-led advocacy organizations has been promotion
of the right to use sign language in a variety of settings, from those
involving the larger society to those surrounding deaf children’s use
of sign language. These organizations maintain that this is a core right,
one that can ensure that deaf people are able to fully participate in
society at large. This article traces the formation of a sign language–based
human rights discourse by deaf communities and outlines what
appear to be the main tenets of this discourse. It examines the historical
period preceding the era of sign language legislation to explain
why a particular form of language planning—status planning—figures
so prominently in legislative measures to date. The application of this
discourse can be seen in an overview of the legal recognition of sign
language in subnational, national, and international settings. A look
at research on the outcomes of existing legislation (and legislative
efforts) reveals that subsequent outcomes have not fully realized deaf
organizations’ stated linguistic human rights goals. A specific failure
noted by deaf organizations is that current legislation has not brought
about legally codified sign language rights for deaf children.
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Ideologies and Attitudes toward Sign
Languages: An Approximation
Attitudes are complex and little research in the field of linguistics has
focused on language attitudes. This article deals with attitudes toward sign
languages and those who use them—attitudes that are influenced by ideological
constructions. The article reviews five categories of such constructions and
discusses examples in each one.
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Standardization of Sign Languages
Over the years attempts have been made to standardize sign languages. This form
of language planning has been tackled by a variety of agents, most notably
teachers of Deaf students, social workers, government agencies, and occasionally
groups of Deaf people themselves. Their efforts have most often involved the
development of sign language books with lists of signs in alphabetical order (as
distinct from sign language principles) and more recently as CDROMs, DVDs, or
websites. With regard to the all-important question about language
standardization, Karin Hoyer asks, “Who is behind the effort?” and goes on to
say that “standardization actions (often with the aim of reducing lexical
variation) have frequently been undertaken with the strong support of the
hearing-run education system—from outside, often without any support from the
language users themselves” (2012, 32). Today, sign language planning is still
carried out largely by hearing professionals; thus, that standardization still
needs to be examined in relation to “language ownership” (Eichmann 2009).
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A Barking Dog That Never Bites? The British
Sign Language (Scotland) Bill
This article describes and analyses the pathway to the British Sign Language
(Scotland) Bill and the strategies used to reach it. Data collection has been
done by means of interviews with key players, analysis of official documents,
and participant observation. The article discusses the bill in relation to the
Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 and posits that, although the bill will
raise awareness, it also has significant weaknesses. These include the absence
of enforceable rights, the representative imbalance during the negotiation
process, the perception of BSL as a tool to access public services, the question
who is benefiting from recognition, and most of all the absence of educational
linguistic rights and cultural rights.
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Evaluating Effects of Language Recognition
on Language Rights and the Vitality of New Zealand Sign Language
Status planning through legislation made New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) an
official language in 2006. But this strong symbolic action did not create
resources or mechanisms to further the aims of the act. In this article we
discuss the extent to which legal recognition and ensuing language-planning
activities by state and community have affected the instrumental rights of Deaf
NZSL users and consider the prospects for the vitality of NZSL. As evidence, we
draw on both the findings of a 2013 Human Rights Commission inquiry into
inequalities for NZSL users and data from a study of the vitality of NZSL. We
conclude that progress on the language recognition outcomes desired by the Deaf
community falls well short of aspirations and that the vitality of NZSL is
threatened by declining community size and the current conditions for
intergenerational transmission.
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The Legal Recognition of Sign Languages
This article provides an analytical overview of the different types of explicit
legal recognition of sign languages. Five categories are distinguished:
constitutional recognition, recognition by means of general language
legislation, recognition by means of a sign language law or act, recognition by
means of a sign language law or act including other means of communication, and
recognition by legislation on the functioning of the national language council.
The article further describes three categories of implicit (legal) recognition.
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