The Language Without Speech: Sign Language

Indian Sign Language Alphabet, 

Human beings cannot stop talking. All we want is the communication with our fellow human beings. As we have seen, Children are bio-programmed to acquire a language and without any instruction based direct teaching they easily can speak and understand the language quite naturally while they are very young. In fact, any normal child can acquire even extremely intricate grammatical rules within  4-5years without much difficulty.

The way normal child acquire the natural language, in the same way the deaf child also acquire the language, we called Sign language. In later life, they become so habituated with the sign language that even in sleep they talk in Sign Language. There are approximately 70 million deaf people in the world who use sign language as their “mother tongue” or first language.

Sign language provides a full-fledged system of communication to the signer. Acquisition of sign language can be explained with the notion of “Critical Period (CP)” (Eric Heinz Lenneberg: 1967). The research of Newport (1990) and many other research scholars show that the exposure of sign language is very effective at early age in order to completely acquire the language. It has been observed that after 13years of age when the sign language introduced to a deaf child then there would be a greater degree of difference from the grammar of deaf children exposed to sign language from birth.

Deaf children naturally acquire the sign language from their deaf parents. For the case of deaf children of normal parents, they develop their own sign language. There is no uniform sign language in the world. Each community of sign language user develop their own version.

Human ability to create a „brand-new‟ language we have seen in “Plantation Creole” though they share features of Superstrate and Substrate languages. A prominent example of creolisation in sign language is Nicaraguan Sign language. During the formation of Nicaraguan Sign language, deaf children were brought together in the 1980s in a school in Nicaraguan who had no exposure to any language. Those children quickly developed a pidgin sign language but at the first phase they were not capable of providing the entire communication need of a human. But in course of time it became more complex for fulfilling the required need. In this case, Nicaraguan Sign language emerged from human contact but not language contact. Along with other sign languages it has the capacity of expressing human feeling like other natural languages.

But still, Sign languages are considered merely as a gesture and not as a natural language, the picture is more so in India. The struggle for the right of Indian Sign language and its promotion is a recent phenomenon. Although there are 5 million deaf people in India who use Indian Sign Language (ISL). We have no solid evidence about the history and development of Indian Sign Language but safely we can assume that varieties of ISL evolved in schools for the deaf during the end of the nineteenth century.

Deaf people who use sign language are not stupid and they are not backward in any way. Lack of interest in Deaf issue and sign languages are very prominent in the policy making. In the syllabus of Special Education in Hearing Impairment (B.Ed.) negligible proportion of course are prescribed for Indian Sign Language (Only 3 per cent). The sign languages are different from spoken language in term of modality only.

In India Prof. Ulrike Zeshan (Director, International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies) has established that ISL is a proper language bearing all the features of language and this is a natural language for Indian deaf people. Although it has a legally recognition as a language in India still Indian Sign Language is not allowed in most of the Indian schools and discouraged by the policy makers.

Being the citizen of India, ISL users also have equal right to exercise their civil as well as linguistic rights. They also have their opinion on “Make in India” and they have the right to use sign language in all areas of life.

UN Convention of Rights for Persons with Disabilities, for achieving empowerment and insertion of persons with disabilities, should also be implemented in India. The cost of exclusion of people with disability from the workforce is 3-7 per cent of the GDP. So it is the high time to promote ISL at least for the sake of our Indian economy.

Deaf people in India face systematic inequalities. Many of these inequalities have their roots in the lack of understanding of the special linguistic and cultural traditions of Indian Deaf communities. That lack of understanding comes from government policies, administration and academics. Research is not merely of great academic interest, it is an urgent social need, a prerequisite to the development of better policies and practices, and a silver lining towards greater empowerment.

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