Sign Language Studies

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...