http://www.terralingua.org/DeafHR.html
Compiled by Dr. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas.
The European Union of the Deaf (E. U. D.) organised an E. U. D. SIGN LANGUAGES DAY on 6 December, 2001 at the European Parliament in Brussels, with close to 200 participants and several M.Ps. and M.E.Ps. (Members of the European Parliament) as speakers. Terralingua's Vice-President had been asked to introduce the topic. The goal was to discuss the linguistic human rights of Sign language users, especially the fact that no European state has so far included Sign languages in the languages for which they have ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The arguments used by the Council of Europe and by the various states to exclude Sign languages has been based on ignorance of the nature of Sign languages, and faulty logic. Skutnabb-Kangas presented and de-constructed these arguments in the panel discussion at the Sign Languages Day meeting, based on an extract "Arguments to Exclude Sign Languages from the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages" (from Skutnabb-Kangas, in press). The E. U. D. wants the states to amend this, and to treat Sign languages on a par with other minority languages. The conference passed the Resolution below; it is still awaiting its formal adoption by the E. U. D. General Assembly in June 2002. More on the E. U. D. on its Web site www.eudnet.org/. Questions and comments should be addressed to E. U. D.'s Director, Helga Stevens, at info@eudnet.org.
The following extract about basic concepts in discussing Sign languages and the Deaf (and Sign language users) (or the Visualists, as Brice Alden calls them, in 2001), comes from Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2000). Linguistic genocide in education — or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, New Jersey & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Chapter 4.
Definition Box 4.1. Some basics: pathological versus sociocultural ideologies of Deafness; "Deaf" vs. "deaf"; Sign languages vs. manually coded oral languages (Manual Sign Codes); manualists vs. oralists; Total Communication.
The pathological view sees deafness as an auditory deficiency, a handicap, a medical problem to be remedied so that the deaf person becomes as much like a hearing person as possible. Means used are teaching speech and lip-reading, hearing aids, cochlear implants, etc. The sociocultural view sees the Deaf as a sociocultural minority ("different" but not deficient) which shares characteristics with other minorities and where problems the Deaf face can be seen as human rights problems (see Reagan 1995a, and references to Branson & Miller in the bibliography).
In writing, "deaf" commonly "refers to deafness solely as an audiological condition" whereas "Deaf" describes deafness "as a cultural condition" (Reagan 1995a: 240) and the capitalisation is used just like for other cultural/linguistic groups (Hispanic, Greek-Australian). "Thus, a person can be "deaf" without being "Deaf" (as in the case of an older person who gradually loses his/her hearing)" (ibid.). Likewise, a deaf child of hearing parents who has no contact with any Deaf community is also "deaf", not "Deaf" — a tragic situation. And a person can be "Deaf" without being "deaf", as a bilingual bicultural person who grew up bilingually, as hearing, but with signing Deaf parents, and therefore as Sign language as (one of) the mother tongue(s). This is the group that the best interpreters often come from. Audiological deafness "is actually neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for cultural deafness", as Timothy Reagan formulates it (1995a: 244).
Sign languages are those natural languages that developed in Deaf communities approximately in the same way as spoken languages developed in hearing communities. Examples are AUSLAN (Australian Sign Language), A.S.L. (American Sign Language), or Swedish Sign Language. Even all these are in a way misnomers — they are the dominant, partially standardised, named Sign languages from the three countries concerned, but there are many other Sign languages in those countries. Sign languages are complex, abstract linguistic systems, with their own grammars. They have "a small closed set of distinctive features, meaningless in themselves which...combine in ways peculiar to [each] language to form morphemes, i.e., signs which denote meaning" (Stokoe 1974: 367). Sign languages combine the morphemes into meaningful "signs".
In analyzing a sign, the equivalent of the phoneme is the "chereme". Cheremic variation in individual signs plays precisely the same rôle in differentiating one sign from another as does phonological variation in distinguishing words from one another. In natural Sign languages, there are five parameters within which cheremic variations occur: (1) handshape(s); (2) location of sign; (3) palm orientation; (3) movement(s); and (5) nonmanual features (e.g., facial expressions, use of shoulders and body, and so on)... By changing the chereme in any one of these five areas, the meaning of a sign is altered (Reagan 1995b: 135).
Since the majority of signs, just like words in a spoken language, are fundamentally arbitrary, Sign languages are "no more mutually intelligible or 'universal' than would be comparable spoken languages" (Reagan 1995b: 134). This myth of them being mutually intelligible is partially based on a relatively small number of iconic signs which are comparable to onomatopoetic words in spoken languages (like "hiss" or "buzz" in English). Even iconic signs may be culture-specific. Timothy Reagan gives as an example the sign for "basket" in South African Sign languages: white signers indicate a basket carried by hand, while "many, especially rural, black signers will indicate a basket being carried on the head" (ibid., 136). There is also a partially planned lingua franca, International Sign language, to a large extent based on A.S.L.
Manual Sign Codes "seek to represent the lexical items of an oral/aural language", for instance Swedish or English, "in a gestural/visual linguistic context" (Reagan 1995b: 140). Thus, these "languages" are NOT Sign languages, but manually coded oral languages. It is thus important to remember the distinction between, e.g., Swedish Sign Language (the language of the Swedish Deaf community, i.e., a language which has evolved "naturally" among the community, just as oral languages have, with its own grammar, vocabulary, etc.), and signed Swedish, which uses manual sign codes for a spoken language, i.e., trying to imitate or represent spoken Swedish with manual codes. There is some terminological confusion here, because the expression "signed LANGUAGES" is sometimes also used about Sign languages if one needs to emphasize that they are just as complex as oral languages, i.e., to counteract the myth that they would not be full languages.
Manual sign codes are relatively recent, and have in most cases been used to teach a dominant oral language to deaf children. As tools for this second language teaching, they may be appropriate; likewise, they can be used as a lingua franca with deaf people who have lost their hearing. The ideology behind them, though, is the pathological one, and it hierarchises languages, with oral languages on top, Sign languages at the bottom, and manual sign codes as the in-between code, trying to bridge what is seen as a gap (see Reagan 1995b for a description of manual codes and the ideologies behind them). Most Deaf communities reject the use of manual sign codes (except, possibly, as tools for L2-learning) and see them as "awkward efforts to impose the structures of a spoken language on sign" (Reagan 1995a: 243) whereas there are various opinions among deaf people. "In A.S.L. there is actually a sign used to denigrate [sic ] a Deaf person who 'thinks like a hearing person', roughly comparable in use to the term "Uncle Tom" among African Americans", Timothy Reagan notes (ibid.: 244).
"Manualists" also has at least two meanings. The Latin "manus" means "hand", and in the more general meaning, manualists are the ones who see use of manual signs as normal or preferable — but these manual signs can be either Sign languages or, more often, manual sign codes. In the more restricted positive sense (e.g., Senghas 1998: 542), manualists are "those who consider Sign languages normal or most appropriate for deaf people". "Oralists" (Latin "os"; genitive "oris'' means "mouth") try to teach Deaf people to speak orally, in a subtractive way, to the exclusion of using Sign language and often forbidding the use of Sign languages.
Both oralists and manualists teach deaf people to lip-read, and to write, oralists subtractively, manualists mostly additively. "Total communication" supporters often try to combine lipreading, speaking and manual sign codes with varying amounts of Sign language use. But Sign language often has the same type of ideological status for them as the mother tongue with supporters of transitional bilingual education, i.e., it is used as a tool to make the transition to the dominant language easier and its full learning and use is not seen as a linguistic human right. In Neisser's (1983: 4, quoted in Reagan 1992: 314) terms total communication meant that "no change in philosophy took place; to all other methods, techniques, training, and curricula, signs were merely added".
See Appendices 21 and 22 with Resolutions from the XI World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf, 1991, detailing what the Deaf themselves want (in Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, eds., pp. 408-412).
Address Box 4.1. Deaf Resources.
Sign Language Resources:
The following list contains some useful addresses for obtaining more information about Deaf resources (see also Alverson 1997: 22-23):
The Deaf Resource Library www.deaflibrary.org/ — Deaf culture in the U.S.A. and Japan; many links; a search engine.
Singapore Association of the Deaf www.sad.org.sg/.
Yamada Web Guide babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides/asl.html — A.S.L. fonts, links (including and interactive Braille and A.S.L. Guide).
The University of Lyon's Sign Language Web site bonucci.univ-lyon2.fr/home/lsf-univ-lyonII.html — can be accessed in English, French or Italian; has a multilingual sign database, Cybersign, that displays signs in several different languages for a given word; an on-line dictionary of French Sign language; and a feature that translates an entered word into 5 languages.
Sign Language Dictionary (A.S.L. and International Sign) on-line http://www.handspeak.com/.
American Sign language Browser commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb/index.html.
Articles, links, discussions (on cochlear implants, etc.) deafness.miningco.com/.
B.B.C. weekly magazine programme in British Sign language a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/see_hear/">www.bbc.co.uk/see_hear/.
About American Sign language, legal questions, education, interpretation, etc. www.deafzone.com/.
Finnish Association of the Deaf (all in Finnish) has lots of good links www.kl-deaf.fi/.
Gallaudet University www.gallaudet.edu/. (See also http://www.deafway.org/ about the next world conference).
International organisations:
For U.N. and other documents on the Deaf, see www.igc.apc.org/habitat/rights and www.dpa.org.sg/DPA/ESCAP/logo.htm.
World Federation of the Deaf www.wfdnews.org/home.asp.
European Union of the Deaf www.eudnet.org/.
Extract from "Language and Human Rights", a plenary paper at the Euro-Sign Conference, 6-8 September, 2001, München, Germany, organised by the Deutscher Gehörlosen-Bund.
By Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Roskilde University, Denmark.
5. Arguments to exclude Sign languages from the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
5.1. What are the arguments?
Verena Krausneker quotes, in her M.A. thesis Sign Languages in the Minority Languages Policy of the European Union (1998: 22), a written statement on Sign languages and the European Charter by Mr. Fernando Albanese. He was the Director of Environment and Local Authorities in the Secretariat General of the Council of Europe at the point when the European Charter was being negotiated. Mr. Albanese does
...not think on the basis of the information in my possession that the Charter applies to Sign Languages. In any case, such a problem was never raised during the negotiations of the Charter.
The "information" that Mr. Albanese claims to possess is, in fact, serious misinformation, completely false. He claims that ...the Sign Languages are connected with a handicap and not with the membership to a group, ethnically, religiously or linguistically different from the majority of the population of a state. A "regional or minority language", for the purposes of the Charter, requires that this language be ...different from the official language(s) of the State; it does not include either dialects of the official language(s) of the State or the languages of migrants. (Article 1 (a) ii).
Mr. Albanese uses the following argument to exclude sign languages. He thinks that the essential element required by the definition, namely ...the difference in respect of the official language(s) of the State" is missing, because "IF I understand it correctly, Sign Languages are means of communication within any language. (1998: 22; emphasis added).
We shall next de-construct the arguments. Mr. Albanese claims two things:
1. the Deaf do not fulfil the requirements of being a minority, and 2. sign languages do not fulfill the requirements for being regional or minority languages.
5.2. De-constructing the arguments: are the Deaf a minority?
The Deaf do objectively fulfill most of the criteria for being a minority, regardless of which definition of a minority is used. The problem is that many of the bureaucrats responsible for the interpretation and management of various Charters and Conventions do not seem to know enough about the characteristics of the Deaf communities to be able to assess to what extent the various criteria are fulfilled (see Capotorti 1979, for the difficulty of defining minorities; see also Andrések 1989, Packer 1993). There is no definition of a minority that would be universally accepted in international law, but most definitions are very similar indeed. Most definitions use as defining characteristics a combination of the following:
A. numbers;[i]
B. dominance is used in some but not others ("in an inferior and non-dominant position", Andrések 1989: 60; "in a non-dominant position", Capotorti 1979: 96);
C. ethnic or religious or linguistic traits, features or characteristics, or cultural bonds and ties which are (markedly) different from those of the rest of the population (in most definitions);
D. a will/wish (if only implicit) to safeguard, or preserve, or strengthen the patterns of life and behaviour, or culture, or traditions, or religion, or language of the group is specifically mentioned in most definitions (e.g., Capotorti 1979: 96). Language is included in most but not all definitions (e.g., not in Andrések's definition 1989: 60);
E. citizenship/nationality in the state concerned is required in most definitions in charters and covenants as part of the definition, i.e., minorities are defined so as to give national or regional minorities more rights than to immigrants and refugees (who, by definition, are considered non-national and non-regional). In contrast, academic definitions for research purposes often make no mention of nationality as a criterion. (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 489-490).
As an example of a broad definition, I present my own definition (from Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1994: 107, Note 2; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 491), which is based on my reformulation of the definition by the Council of Europe Commission for Democracy through Law (91) 7, Art. 2: [ii]
A group which is smaller in number than the rest of the population of a State, whose members have ethnic, religious or linguistic features different from those of the rest of the population, and are guided, if only implicitly, by the will to safeguard their culture, traditions, religion or language. Any group coming within the terms of this definition shall be treated as an ethnic, religious or linguistic minority. To belong to a minority shall be a matter of individual choice.
I have, in this definition, omitted the requirement of citizenship ("who are nationals of that State"), because a forced change of citizenship, to my mind, cannot be required in order to be able to enjoy basic human rights. [iii] Besides, most Deaf persons are citizens of the state where they live.
As we can see, the Deaf fulfill all the criteria:
1. they are as a group "smaller in number than the rest of the population of a State"; 2. they "have...linguistic features different from those of the rest of the population"; and 3. they have, through their organizations, shown "the will to safeguard their culture, traditions...or language".
Therefore, the Deaf are a national linguistic minority to whom the European Charter should apply. If an individual claims that she belongs to a national minority, and the State claims that such a national linguistic minority does not exist, there is a conflict, and the State may refuse to grant the minority person or group rights which it has accorded or might accord to national minorities. In many definitions of minority, minority rights thus become conditional on the acceptance by the State of the existence of a minority in the first place. According to my definition (and this part was suggested by Council of Europe itself!), minority status does NOT depend on the acceptance of the State, but is either "objectively" ("coming within the terms of this definition" or subjectively verifiable ("a matter of individual choice"). This interpretation has been confirmed by the U.N. Human Rights Committee in 1994. They re-interpreted Article 27 of the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966, in force since 1976) in a General Comment of 6 April 1994 (U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.5, 1994). Article 27 is still the most far-reaching Article in (binding) human rights law granting linguistic rights:
"In those states in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language".
Until the re-interpretation, the Article was interpreted as:
excluding (im)migrants (who have not been seen as minorities);
excluding groups (even if they are citizens) which are not recognised as minorities by the State;
only conferring some protection against discrimination (= "negative rights") but not a positive right to maintain or even use one's language;
not imposing any obligations on the States.
The U.N. Human Rights Committee sees the Article as:
protecting all individuals on the State's territory or under its jurisdiction (i.e. also immigrants and refugees), irrespective of whether they belong to the minorities specified in the Article or not; stating that the existence of a minority does not depend on a decision by the State but requires to be established by objective criteria; recognizing the existence of a "right";
imposing positive obligations on the States.
For Deaf people this means that various countries minimally have to see the Deaf as a (linguistic) minority, protected by Article 27. Likewise, the re-interpretation means that minorities, including the Deaf, are supposed to have positive language rights, not only the negative right of protection against discrimination. The states where Deaf live, i.e., all states in the world, thus do have positive obligations towards the Deaf as a linguistic minority. In addition, the Deaf can of course also be seen as a group with a handicap, if they so choose, but whether they choose this or not has no consequences for their minority status: they ARE a linguistic minority.
5.3. De-constructing the arguments: are Sign languages minority languages?
A "regional or minority language" for the purposes of the European Charter requires that this language be "different from the official language(s) of the State; it does not include either dialects of the official language(s) of the State or the languages of migrants" (Article 1 (a) ii).
As we remember, Mr. Albanese did not think that Sign languages were different from the official languages because "Sign Languages are means of communication within any language" (Krausneker 1998: 22; emphasis added). In April 2000, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, rejecting the demand by the Danish Association of the Deaf that Sign language be included when Denmark ratifies the Charter, quoted Council of Europe's legal department and argued that Sign Language did not fulfill the criteria for being a minority language; it is a "means of communication" (kommunikationsmiddel) rather than a (historical) language, also because the Danish Deaf use the Danish language in its written form as their written language.
Firstly, Sign languages are completely independent languages and have nothing to do with the official oral languages of the countries where they exist. Mr. Albanese may be thinking of Signed languages or Manual Sign Codes such as Signed Swedish, Signed English, Signed German, etc., but these are NOT Sign languages, only manually coded oral languages. Secondly, ALL languages are "means of communication", even if there are other means of communication, too, such as pictures, dress, jewelry, and so on. Using visual signs rather than oral signs as a means of communication does not make a language less of a language. Thirdly, Sign languages are historical languages in the same way as oral languages are, and some of them may have a longer pedigree than many oral languages. Finally, the Danish Deaf using "the Danish language in its written form as their written language", parallels what practically every Deaf community in the world does, even the ones who have been accorded official minority status by the states they live in. Most Sign languages do not as yet have writing systems that would be easily available for the Deaf. The necessary resources for reducing them to writing have not existed. If languages without (everyday use of) their own writing systems were not seen as languages, some two thirds of the world's oral languages would also disappear, not be seen as languages, because they do not have writing systems, or, if they have them, they have only been used for very few purposes, mostly for translating (parts of) the Bible and writing a few grammars or elementary textbooks but not for everyday communication. Sign languages thus fulfill all the requirements for being minority languages for the purposes of the European Charter.
Verena Krausneker's comment to Helle Skjoldan and me (e-mail, May 2000) when she heard about the Danish argumentation, was "[i]t is shocking to see how one piece of wrong information will be perpetuated and used over and over if it suits the intentions of policy makers. The ones who are in the powerful position to decide over languages, cultures and peoples chances in life often seem to...find arguments to support their interests — and will obviously not hesitate to ignore countless scientific findings and evidence on the nature of sign languages and the irreplaceable position they have in a deaf person's life".
All the arguments excluding Sign languages are thus false and based on complete ignorance of languages in general and Sign languages in particular, as any researcher in the area can testify. Today, important language status planning decisions are based on this type of false information, even in situations where the correct information is easily available and has, in fact, been offered to the decision makers.
This is unethical.
Notes:
(i) It has to be remembered that these definitions are for the purposes of international law, so that it is possible to see which groups are entitled to protection that is granted to minorities. If a group is a majority in terms of numbers but in a dominated position, they may have rights on the basis of other characteristics, e.g., status, class, gender, or the like, but they are not a minority. From a sociological point of view, we may then speak about a minorized majority, i.e., a majority that suffers from a similar type of discrimination that minorities often face.
(ii) This Draft was never accepted by Council of Europe, and the one that replaced it and became the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities does not define minorities.
(iii) This interpretation has since been borne out by the U.N. Human Rights Commission's General Comment on Article 27.
