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1. Language Attitudes
The same range of language attitudes found in spoken language communities can also be
found in Deaf communities. The most crucial attitudes Sign languages 93 are those that
pertain to the very status of sign languages as viable linguistic systems. These attitudes
have always had a very direct effect on the education of deaf children. As eminent a
linguist as Leonard Bloomfield stated that “gesture languages [were] merely
developments of ordinary gestures and that any and all complicated or not immediately
intelligible gestures are based on the conventions of ordinary speech (1933: 39), and
further that “elaborate systems of gesture, deaf-and-dumb language, signaling codes,
the use of writing, telegraphy and so on, turn out, upon inspection, to be merely
derivatives of language” (p. 144). More recently, Griffey, an influential educator of deaf
children in Ireland, has stated that “sign language is quite dependent on concrete
situations and mime. Its informative power can be very limited without knowledge of a
majority language such as English, French, etc.” (1994: 28).

2. Even though the education of deaf children started very promisingly in France and in the
United States with sign language as the medium of instruction, opinions about the
inherent superiority of spoken languages prevailed both in Europe and in the United
States even before the famous conference on deaf education held in Milan in 1880
where it was resolved that speech should take precedence over signs in the teaching of
deaf children and, in fact, that the use of signs would interfere with the learning of
speech and lip reading. As early as the 1840s, the movement for the oral education of
deaf children – using spoken English, for example, as the medium of instruction and
teaching them to speak English to the exclusion of ASL – was rapidly gaining momentum,
partly due to a cultural change in the United States involving views on creationism and
evolution. As Baynton states: “Most of the former [teachers of the deaf] came of age
before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859, and had constructed
their understanding of the world around the theory of immediate creation. Most of
those opposed to the use of sign language belonged to a younger generation whose
worldview was built upon an evolutionary understanding of the world” (1996: 36–37).

3. Similar perceptions have been found in Deaf communities in other
countries. Kyle and Woll (1985) found that when research on sign language
began, deaf people had no label for their language other than “signing” and
did not realize that it was a language. In Ireland, Burns (1998) found that
only two-thirds of deaf subjects recognized Irish Sign Language as a language
and a number of labels such as “broken,” “ugly,” and “telegraphic” have
been used by deaf people to describe their language (Edwards & Ladd
1983). However, as with the use of sign languages as the medium of
instruction for deaf children, deaf perspectives on the status of sign
languages have slowly brightened, helped no doubt by large international
gatherings such as Deaf Way I (1988) and Deaf Way II (2002), conferences
and celebrations of Deaf culture and sign language held in Washington, DC.
Deaf Way I was attended by over 6,000 people and Deaf Way II by 10,000
people from all over the world

4. Teachers of deaf children have of course also formed attitudes about the languages
in question. Training for teachers of the deaf has recently begun to focus on the
use of sign language as the medium of instruction in conjunction with literacy in
the majority language. Training programs even in the recent past did not require
sign language skills and most often required teachers to learn one of the various
manual codes devised to represent the spoken language. Examples of these codes
include Signing Exact English or SEE (Gustason, Pfetzing & Zawolkow 1975),

5. Discourse analysis As with spoken languages, the discourse of natural sign
languages is structured and subject to sociolinguistic description (Metzger &
Bahan 2001), and there are as many discourse genres in sign languages –
conversations, narratives, lectures, sermons, and so forth – as can be found
in spoken languages. In addition, the frequent need for sign language
interpreters has given rise to a genre of interpreted discourse, subject to
specific constraints. Some of these constraints are also very specific to the
legal, educational, or medical setting in which the interpreting is taking
place. Research on sign language discourse can best be described in terms of
the approaches to discourse outlined by Schiffrin (1994). For example, with
regard to speech act theory (Austin 1962

6. Interactional sociolinguistics has proven to be a fruitful lens through which to
view sign language discourse. Signers may show their loyalties and how they
perceive a speech event in a variety of ways: by choosing to sign ASL, by
signing and talking simultaneously, by speaking English with voice (with no
signing at all), or by mouthing voicelessly. Researchers analyzing interactions
can readily observe these choices. Sign languages are also used to establish or
reinforce social relations and to control the behavior of others. For example,
Mather (1987; Mather et al. 2006) has explored adult–child interaction in
elementary school classrooms and also the discourse particular to TTY
(teletypewriter) conversations between deaf interlocutors (1991).

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