In one of the most amazing examples of inclusion in American history, an abled majority learned to sign to accommodate a deaf minority. From the 1600s to the 1950s when it died out, Martha’s Vineyard sign language was a second language that everyone in town used in everyday situations. It was also a precursor to American Sign Language (ASL)

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Everybody here spoke
sign language
The story of Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language
Claudio Luis Vera - Royal Caribbean Group
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Claudio Luis Vera
Accessibility professional
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Nora Ellen Groce, PhD
Anthropologist, Disability advocate

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The medical model
● A disability is a medical condition
● Treated through medication and
therapy
● Assistive technology is there to
improve quality of life
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The social model
● The problem is not the impairment,
it’s the barriers we create as a society.
● We create and perpetuate our own
disabilities.
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The journey to Chilmark
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The Weald
● Group of isolated parishes in Kent
where the emigrants came from.
● Heavily wooded, terrible roads.
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Isolated in Kent
“Someone could spend their entire life
within walking distance of their ancestors’
graves”
Almost all young people found their
marriage partners from the same village
or an adjoining one
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Deafness
● Deafness was an unusually common
trait in later times, when demographic
records were better
● Writings indicate use of sign language
by hearing people
● That language was Old Kentish Sign
Language, which was replaced by BSL
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Separatists
● Lived under the much-hated Charles I
● They felt that Church of England was
so corrupt that they should separate
from it.
● They called themselves “the godly”,
“saints”, or “God’s children”
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Financial hardship
● There were a series of depressions in
the cloth industry of the Wealden
economy in the early 1630s
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Emigrants
● 1634 two hundred emigrated from
the Weald to Scituate on the ships
Hercules and the Griffin
● Part of a mass migration of 21,000

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Scituate
● Known as the “Men of Kent”
● Spellings often change:
Lombard could be Lumpert,
Lampert, Lambert

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Quick geography
● Scituate was the second town in the
Plymouth Bay colony
● Barnstable was the one of the first
towns on Cape Cod
● Chilmark is a village in the western
part of Martha’s Vineyard
Scituate
Barnstable
Chilmark

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Jonathan Lambert
Puritan settler
● 1657 - born in Barnstable
● 1683 – gets married
● 1690 – part of expedition to Quebec
● 1692 - First deaf Vineyarder on
record

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Lambert’s
Cove
1694 – Jonathan
Lambert buys a
tract of land on
west side of
Martha’s Vineyard

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Deafness in Chilmark

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Building a
family
2 of 7 children are
born ”deaf-mute” in
the Lambert house

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Not just in his
family
The recessive deafness
gene runs through many
of the other settler
families
Incidence of 1 in 4
offspring

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Intermarriage
By the late 1700s,
96 percent married
someone to whom
they were already
related:
• first, second,
third cousins
• double cousins
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Down-island
Prosperity,
China trade and
whaling in
Edgartown

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Up-island
Isolated with no
good harbors.
A full day’s ride
from Edgartown

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1 in 25 Vineyarders
was born deaf
● By the middle of the nineteenth
century, the number of deaf
individuals were about 1 in 25.
● That’s 4.0%, compared to 0.22% in
the US today born with some hearing
loss

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Viewed as typical
● Deafness was seen as something that
“just happened”
● Anyone could have deaf children

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Testimonials
● “You’d never hardly know they were
deaf and dumb. People up there got
so used to them that they didn’t take
hardly any notice of them.”
● “It was taken pretty much for granted.
It was as if somebody had brown eyes
and somebody else had blue.”

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How the deaf felt
● Deafness was not a tragedy
● Most deaf islanders considered it an
inconvenience, not a serious disability
● Outsiders viewed it as pride in their
condition

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Universal fluency
● All up-islanders were fluent in sign
language by the mid-1800s
● It was taken for granted that you
knew how to sign
● Outsiders describe feeling at a loss
for not knowing

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A language with no
name
● It was considered practical
knowledge, like planting or fishing
● It was called “talking deaf and dumb”
photo: sign for “boat”

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How people learned it
● Not taught in school
● If someone in the family was deaf, you
“just picked up the language”
● Otherwise, you learned it casually
through social interactions, like
running errands

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Sign language in everyday life

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Code
switching
Changing to
sign language when
having an off-color
conversation

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Reaching
further
Using sound to get
attention, then
switching to sign
language

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Town
meetings
A hearing person
would sign for the
deaf attendees

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Not defined
by a disability
“Oh right, come to
think of it they were
deaf and dumb.”

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Alexander Graham Bell
● Married to Mabel Gardiner Hubbard,
who was deaf from age five
● Keen interest in audiology
● Researched deafness on the Vineyard
for 4 years
● Never found the root

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Eugenics
● Bell felt that deaf people should not
risk having deaf children
● Was not aware of Gregor Mendel’s
findings on recessive traits

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Oralism
● Bell felt that deaf children should be
brought up to speak, as it made them
more “mainstream”
● Prevailing approach until recently

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Science proves
otherwise
● A deaf child raised only to speak will
have a vocabulary of 75 words at age
5
● A deaf child raised to sign only or to
sign and speak will have a vocabulary
of 1,000 words at age 5

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Chilmark’s legacy

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Influence on ASL
● Intermixing of Martha’s Vineyard Sign
Language with French Sign Language
at the American School for the Deaf
● ASL was not designed top-down or by
committee

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Bias against
the
“unwriteable”
Bias towards
written languages
Indigenous and sign
languages are not
“real” languages

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Declining numbers
● The trait receded as the gene pool
broadened
● Last native speaker passed away in
1957

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A language can
die in two
generations
Immigrants’ language is
often lost from one
generation to the next
Children can’t
communicate with their
grandparents

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Birth of a
new sign
language
Created by
adolescents at a
group of vocational
schools for the deaf
in Nicaragua
founded in 1980

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Evolving language
● Started with sign alphabet
● Mímicas or crude hand gestures
● Pidgin language, which mixes these
mímicas with new gestures
● Grew in complexity with tense,
person, and other complex features

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Thank you
Claudio Luis Vera - Accessibility Professional, UX Designer, human
Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd.
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