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Sign Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2008

Rachel I. Mayberry
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Extract

Most of what we know about sign language we have learned over the past ten years, although the phenomenon of communicating with the hands and eyes rather than with the mouth and ears has existed, no doubt, throughout history whenever and wherever there have been groups of deaf adults and/or children. The reasons why sign language has been so neglected are intimately connected with the attitudes and beliefs society has evolved about the nature of language, both in terms of what language is and what it signifies, such as the beliefs that language is the hallmark of human evolution, language is thinking, language is an auditory and oral phenomenon. Within this context, sign language is not language, and communicating with sign language rather than spoken language comes replete with a host of negative implications. It comes as no surprise, then, that the people throughout history who have been in the best position to study and describe sign language––deaf people and people whose profession is deafness––have devoted most of their time and energy to defending sign language rather than analyzing and describing it.

Type
Psycholinguistics
Information
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , Volume 1 , March 1980 , pp. 151 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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