In a different voice: Sign language preservation and America's deaf community

Bilingual Research Journal, Fall 2000 by Burch, Susan

The concern for advocates of Deaf culture was the deterioration of a sophisticated, graceful Sign Language, the Sign Language of the educated Deaf. As Tom L. Anderson, (known affectionately as TLA) vocational teacher and president of the NAD in 1940, forcefully described the situation:

It is apparent to me that we have lost many of the influences which formerly tended to standardize the manual language. I am led to the conclusion that the loss of these influences, and the substitution of several more or less unwholesome influences, is tending to bring forward an inferior Sign Language which we refer to [as] "a Sign Language" more correctly than as "the Sign Language.". . . First, I believe that the Sign Language as it came to me through the acknowledged masters has suffered in the hands of young hearing people who have taken it up without proper grounding in theory and practice .... Second, the Sign Language as my generation inherited it has suffered the loss of its idiomatic grace and rhythm by being forced to trail along behind the spoken word .... Why, in place [of eloquent signs] must we be offered a mongrel gibberish-actually the "weed language" which an oral enthusiast once unjustly called the Sign Language of the past generation? (Anderson, 1938, pp. 120-121, 126)

Anderson's peers agreed, and differentiated which Sign Language they supported by consistently labeling it "the Sign Language," the beautiful Sign Language, and even more tellingly, the "Gallaudet Sign Language" (NAD Proceedings, 1910, p. 90). For Anderson and others, this break with the Sign Language of their cultural ancestors had historic significance as well as practical implications. While oralists could not eliminate signed language altogether, efforts to stifle the language of Clerc undermined Deaf people's ability to stand on equal intellectual and linguistic ground with their hearing peers. In essence, it sought to cut the tie between the past and present, leaving Deaf people without historic roots and more vulnerable to the gravitational pull of a mainstream, hearing world that stigmatized Deafness.

In an attempt to codify and legitimize the beautiful Sign Language to the hearing public, several dictionaries were created. The first was published in 1908 by J. Schuyler Long, a principal at the Iowa School for the Deaf and an opponent of pure oralism. His work began as a way to help hearing teachers communicate better with Deaf pupils and help Deaf graduates acquire a more certain and accurate command of their natural language. Long, an active member in various Deaf and educational organizations, also hoped to "preserve this expressive language, to which the Deaf owe so much, in its original purity and beauty, and ... [provide] a standard of comparison in different parts of the country, thereby tending to secure greater uniformity" (Long, 1918, p. 10). Such uniformity in language, Long hoped, would also increase greater cohesion and unity within the Deaf community itself. Its reception, by Deaf members as well as their hearing advocates, was immediate and vast. By the 1950s four reprints had been made, and select sections were reproduced in the 1908 and 1909 issues of the American Annals of the Deaf, the premier journal for professional Deaf educators and administrators. Although the term "American Sign Language" (ASL) had not yet been coined, Long's explanation of the grammatical structure of this Sign Language demonstrated that it was a proper language and not simply manually coded English (cf. Anderson, 1938).