• Linguistic Resurgence—Exploring Iconicity in French Sign Language
• Christian Cuxac (bio)

It was in 1975 that I first met the Deaf world. As a student in linguistics, I was asked to give introductory courses in linguistics to future teachers of deaf students at the National Institute for Young Deaf People (INJS) in Paris. Like most other naive people who had had the opportunity to see deaf children, teenagers, and adults communicating in signs in public, I had assumed wrongly that this mode of communication (this language?) was used in the classrooms. I discovered at the INJS that it was not the case.

At this institute, sign communication between students was tolerated in living areas other than classrooms, where students were only supposed to speak. Thus, in the corridors, the playground, the dining room, and the dormitories, we saw only that: thousands of signs. When asked "Why don't you use signs with your students?" the "specialists"—teachers, speech therapists, educators, all necessarily hearing—answered that it was not a language (even if they themselves had no knowledge of it) and that, consequently, it would be detrimental to learning French. However, observation of the students' exchanges clearly revealed all the features of a language. In the playground, students signed to each other, played, told stories, [End Page 390] argued, laughed, gave advice, just as hearing students do with their vocal language.

Indeed, in France in the middle of the 1970s, the oralist ideology reigned supreme in the education of deaf children and teenagers. Very quickly, I understood that what characterized this method during these school years was not only the aim of giving the deaf child access to the oral language of this country (who would not want this?), but also doing this in a way that subordinated an aim of giving access to a broad range of knowledge to that of simply acquiring a preliminary knowledge of the vocal language, this being deemed the only language fit to convey broader information.

The result of this oralist-only approach was to delay deaf children's progress in their ten years of elementary school behind that of their hearing counterparts, as access to a vocal language involved methods very difficult for deaf children (i.e., "démutisation" through hearing-aid devices and lipreading). Signing (at the time, there was no designation such as "langue des signes") was forbidden in the classroom, and many specialized institutions even went so far as to forbid gestural communication between students in all places connected with the institution. The list of occupations available to deaf adults coming from these schools was drastically limited to a few manual jobs. There was also, at that time, no professionally trained corps of interpreters; only a handful of volunteers (mainly Codas [children of deaf adults]) provided the occasional intercommunity link.

Some deaf people, but also some hearing people (educators, teachers, researchers in the humanities) were revolted by this discriminatory policy. The main trigger for the worldwide movement that came to be called the "Deaf Awakening" took place that same year, 1975, at the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) meeting in Washington, DC.

In the United States, the situation at that time was quite different from that in France. The practice of sign language was, contrary to all of Europe, not totally forbidden in all schools for the deaf following the Milan Congress but was present at some level in most schools. American deaf adults assumed a range of social roles unimaginable in France. For the European participants at the Washington WFD meeting, it was easy to posit a causal link between the mode of education [End Page 391] and opportunities for deaf adults (i.e., that in the United States, the absence of a general ban on sign language in schools seemed to be an important factor for the successful sociocultural integration of the deaf population).

During the 1975 WFD meeting, a small group of participants was formed in order to set up an alternative to the discriminatory educational policy toward young deaf people in France. It included deaf members of associations, a few hearing professionals, and a sociologist, Bernard Mottez. Like several other people, I quickly joined this...

• 语言复兴——探索法国手语的象征性
• 克里斯蒂安·库克萨克（简介）

1975年，我第一次见到聋人世界。作为一名语言学专业的学生，​​我被要求为巴黎国家青少年聋人研究所 (INJS) 未来聋哑学生的老师讲授语言学入门课程。像大多数其他有机会看到聋哑儿童、青少年和成人在公共场合用手势交流的天真的人一样，我错误地认为这种交流方式（这种语言？）在课堂上使用。我在 INJS 发现事实并非如此。

在这所学院，学生之间的手语交流在教室以外的生活区是可以接受的，教室里学生只能说话。于是，在走廊里、操场上、餐厅里、宿舍里，我们看到的只有：成千上万的标牌。当被问到“为什么不在学生身上使用标语？” “专家”——教师、言语治疗师、教育工作者，所有人都必须有听力——回答说，这不是一种语言（即使他们自己对此一无所知），因此，这对学习法语是有害的。然而，对学生交流的观察清楚地揭示了语言的所有特征。操场上，学生们互相签名、玩耍、讲故事、争论、大笑、提出建议，就像聆听学生用声音语言一样。

事实上，在 20 世纪 70 年代中期的法国，口语意识形态在聋哑儿童和青少年的教育中占据了主导地位。很快，我就明白了，在这些学年里，这种方法的特点不仅是为了让聋哑孩子接触到这个国家的口语（谁不想要这个？），而且是以一种从属的方式做到这一点。其目的是提供广泛的知识，而不是仅仅获得有声语言的初步知识，这被认为是唯一适合传达更广泛信息的语言。

这种仅限口语者的方法的结果是，聋哑儿童在小学十年内的进步落后于听力正常的同龄人，因为获得有声语言涉及对聋哑儿童来说非常困难的方法（即通过听力进行“去穆化”）。辅助设备和唇读）。课堂上禁止手语（当时还没有“langue des Signes”之类的名称），许多专门机构甚至禁止在与机构有关的所有场所学生之间进行手势交流。来自这些学校的聋人成年人可以从事的职业清单基本上仅限于一些体力工作。当时也没有经过专业训练的翻译队伍；只有少数志愿者（主要是 Codas [聋哑成人的孩子]）偶尔提供社区间的联系。

一些聋哑人，但也有一些听力正常的人（教育工作者、教师、人文学科研究人员）对这种歧视性政策感到不满。同年，即 1975 年，在华盛顿特区举行的世界聋人联合会 (WFD) 会议上，引发了后来被称为“聋人觉醒”的全球运动。

在美国，当时的情况与法国有很大不同。与整个欧洲相反，米兰大会之后，并非所有聋人学校都完全禁止使用手语，但大多数学校都在某种程度上存在手语的做法。美国聋人成年人承担了一系列在法国难以想象的社会角色。对于参加华盛顿 WFD 会议的欧洲参与者来说，很容易在教育模式[第 391 页]和失聪成年人的机会之间建立因果关系（即，在美国，没有全面禁止手语）学校语言似乎是聋人群体成功融入社会文化的一个重要因素）。

在 1975 年的 WFD 会议期间，一小群参与者成立，旨在制定替代方案，以替代法国针对年轻聋人的歧视性教育政策。其中包括聋哑协会成员、一些听力专业人士和社会学家伯纳德·莫特兹。和其他几个人一样，我很快就加入了这个......