statistics on official recognition of SLs?

[Barbara Gerner De Garcia]

*American Sign Language is the most used minority language yet almost the
only minority language which lacks official government
recognition.[citation needed]
*
I just taught a course on language rights Fall semester and this statement
is totally inaccurate. First of all, ASL is* not* the most used "minority"
language. According to the US Census publication *Language Use in the US
2007* (Shin & Kominsky, 2010), over 34 million residents age 5 and over
speak Spanish at home.  When we cite statistics for ASL "users" we tend to
include hearing people who have learned ASL (high school and college
students). If we add those groups to the number of people in the US who
"use" Spanish, you can see that the number easily would exceed the number
of those who "use" ASL.  Second, the phrase "official government
recognition" is vague.  In the U.S., there is no official language, period.
We do have protections in the U.S. against discrimination based on the
language a person uses, but there are no "affirmative" or "positive"
language rights that guarantee a person the right to use their language.
The WFD has linguistic human rights for sign language users at the core of
its positions, and the UNCRPD - UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities also expresses sign language rights as the core issue for
people who are Deaf and Deaf education.

Barbara Gerner de Garcia
p.s. Although I am guilty of often using Wikipedia, this statement helps
illuminate why my university suggests that faculty include a statement on
their syllabi that the use of Wikipedia is prohibited for student work
(BTW, I do not have such a statement on any of my syllabi).

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Mark A.Mandel <mamandel at ldc.upenn.edu>wrote:

> The Wikipedia article "Minority languages" includes the paragraph (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_language#Controversy)
>
> ---
> Signed languages are often not recognized as true natural languages even
> though they are supported by extensive research. In the United States, for
> example, American Sign Language is the most used minority language yet
> almost the only minority language which lacks official government
> recognition.[citation needed]
> ---
>
> How accurate are these statements? Can the paragraph and the article be
> improved with reliable and recent data?
>
> --
> Mark A. Mandel
> Linguistic Data Consortium
> University of Pennsylvania
>
>
>
>


-- 
Dr. Barbara Gerner de Garcia, Professor and Chair
Department of Educational Foundations and Research
Gallaudet University
800 Florida Ave NE
Washington, DC 20002-3695

Phone: 202-651-5207
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