Black, Deaf and Extremely Online

[conuly]

I've read articles on Black ASL before.

The comments here are off, but in every one of the other articles the comments had people going huffily "I don't know why they don't teach those kids CORRECT sign language".

...

So, the general core of linguistics is that native speakers do not make mistakes in their own language, and that one speech variety is not "more" or "less" correct than any other. When we say that one dialect is "more correct" - or, more often, that one feature of a dialect is "wrong" and, for reasons, not really a dialect anyway because it's just "wrong" - we're not really talking about any inherent properties of the language, no matter how much we try to rationalize it away. We're talking about the people who speak that way.

It is not surprising, then, that people who know nothing about any sort of ASL, or, indeed, any sort of sign language would make the knee-jerk assumption that if there are two varieties then one of them is the right one and, obviously, the right one is therefore the one used by white people.

(This article goes perhaps too far in the other direction, suggesting that Black ASL is superior because it's closer to older forms of ASL.. because the students were left in the hands of (white) Deaf teachers instead of hearing teachers committed to oralism at all costs. Neither older nor newer is "better", of course. There is no "better".)

Comments

[wpadmirer]

Personally, I love the colloquial aspects of language more than it being "right." Language is beautiful and malleable, and an art form itself.

Being from the South, I can hear the differences in the accents and the expressions from one area of the South to the next. I love reading about the differences from one region of a country to another.

That ASL embodies these same types of differences just makes sense. It's language - and language is a reflection of the culture of the people who speak it.

[conuly]

In this case, the existence of Black ASL is a reflection of the greater hearing culture, which insisted on segregated schools and didn't put much emphasis on "modern methods" for Black students. Lucky for them!