American Sign Language Deserves Elevated Status

Sunday, January 23, 1994

By GREGORY J. RUMMO

      A FEW months ago Heather Whitestone danced her way into our hearts.
    "Yes, I am the first deaf Miss America," she told reporters. "I don't mind, that's an honor."
    Whitestone is one of the "lucky" ones -- those who are deaf, but who lost their hearing as infants after the development of some spoken language skills. She is an excellent lip reader and speaks clearly. She carried on a press conference with only minimum difficulty in understanding reporters' questions.
    For many deaf people who are born with a "profound" hearing loss, such a feat would be an impossibility. Locked into "signing" -- communicating with a vocabulary of hand motions and finger-spelled words -- they are truly living in a silent world. Their language is American Sign Language (ASL).
    Sign language was developed in France around 1783. It grew out of the realization that the deaf could have ideas presented inside their minds only through sight, and it rapidly caught on in Europe. This seems so obvious to us today, yet the debate that preceded sign language's acceptance in deaf schools involved much of the intellectual world centered in such cities as Paris, Leipzig, Vienna, and Zurich.
    In "The Study and Use of Sign Language," written as the preface to "American Sign Language, a Comprehensive Dictionary," William C. Stokoe Jr. writes, "For more than a hundred years, `signing' has been strictly prohibited in a few schools [and] discouraged [or] neglected in the rest. It has been treated as unsuitable behavior, something to be ashamed of or repressed instead of as an object of study and a language to use. Educated deaf persons have been decrying this treatment of sign language since it began."
    Today the situation has improved, but more could be done to increase public awareness of the deaf and their culture.
    One group has suggested legislation that would elevate ASL to foreign language status. Resolution 103, drafted under the guidance of The Northwest Jersey Association of the Deaf, is assigned to the Assembly Education Committee.
    Citing ASL's status as a true language with unique rules, grammar, and syntax, the proposal reads: "It is appropriate that this house take action to support the effort to gain academic recognition of ASL as a language which will foster understanding of the deaf culture by college and high school students and advance public recognition of that culture as one which is separate and unique."
    While "separate and unique" are accurate definitions of the deaf culture, "isolation" may be closer to the truth. Many deaf are in a sense trapped in their own world due to the physical limitations of deafness.
    I first became involved in the deaf world when I began dating the woman I would later marry. Her parents are deaf and I wanted to be able to communicate with my future in-laws. For about six months on Monday evenings, as my fiancee graded school papers in her room, I sat across the kitchen table with her mother. Using a copy of "The Joy of Signing," I learned to communicate with my hands and my eyes.
    It was to cushion the blow somewhat when our second son was born. James, who turned 3 in July, is profoundly deaf. We began signing to him immediately. He is a normal 3-year-old boy -- except he cannot hear. He is a tease. He laughs. He cries -- sometimes we cry with him. He is just as much the joy of our lives as is our hearing 6-year-old, John.
    One would think raising a deaf child would be filled with difficulties. You can't shout to warn of an oncoming car or sing a lullaby to ease the transition into sweet sleep. But sentences such as "after dinner we will take a bath, then read your book," are routine and immediately grasped, and part of a vocabulary of several hundred "words." His favorite story is the Old Testament account of Moses leading the Jews out from under Egyptian bondage. "Pharaoh said NO!" is his way of explaining the Egyptian leader's obdurate defiance.
    There is no such thing as a hurried comment while passing in the hall or shouting from one room to the next. When we "speak," we must make eye contact. And that's when real communication happens -- for deaf and hearing alike. The eyes are the window to the heart, and James has found my heart's window.
    Those of us who are hearing cannot help but feel sorry for those who will never hear the song of a wood thrush on a bright spring afternoon, or the majestic strains of a Beethoven symphony. But many of the deaf don't consider deafness a handicap. They simply view it as part of their culture -- part of "the deaf world."
    Passage of Resolution 103 would be an important first step toward making those of us who can hear more aware of this silent world and the people who live therein.

You may e-mail the author at GregoryJRummo@aol.com