Sign Language Exhibition

[Inge Zwitserlood]

SIGN LANGUAGE EXHIBITION AT UTRECHT UNIVERSITY

Starting Friday 26 June (and lasting until February 1999),
the University Museum of Utrecht University (the Netherlands) hosts:

        KIJK ! TAAL

        An exhibition on aspects of Sign Language


Until comparatively recently, educational environments and conditions for
acquiring sign language were far from perfect. In Europe during the first
half of this century, the use of sign language was often prohibited in
schools and institutions for the deaf, out of the noble but essentially
mistaken belief that learning to speak would be the deaf person's doorway to
society.
Fortunately, these ideas are now considered outdated and detrimental to the
deafs' cause. In the Netherlands, Nederlandse Gebaren Taal is on the verge
of being officially recognized by the government as a minority language on
Dutch soil.

This exhibition is presented from the point of view that Sign Language is an
extremely `visual' form of language. It takes the opportunity the provide
general information about language, and languages, to a relatively lay
public, and emphasizes that sign languages are the natural languages of the
hearing impaired anywhere in the world. In a simple fashion, and by dint of
a number of specially developed games, it discusses some basic linguistic
notions such as the language faculty in the brain, the process of language
acquisition, and the building blocks of words and sentences. And it
addresses some common misunderstandings about sign languages: they are
neither completely `iconic' nor universal, they are not simply the
word-by-word signed counterparts of the spoken languages of the same
cultural community, you can perform poetry in them, make jokes, and so on.

"Kijk ! Taal" is a joint production of the Utrecht University Museum, the
The Hague Vi-taal Foundation (Tony Bloem and Ruud Janssen), and the Utrecht
Institute of Linguistics (Wim Zonneveld and Inge Zwitserlood).

Museum open: 11-17 hrs. daily (Sa/Sun 13-17 hrs.)
The Lange Nieuwstraat 106, where the museum is situated in a beautiful new
building in the Utrecht "Museum Quarter", is a 5 minutes walk from the
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics at Trans 10. From Trans, rather than turn
right towards the Inner City and the Dom Tower, turn left: this is the Korte
Nieuwstraat which inevitably spills into the Lange Nieuwstraat.
Utrecht is a 20 minute train ride from Amsterdam. The museum's location is a
20 minutes walk (or a 10 minutes bus ride) from the central railway station:
go through the Inner City towards the Dom Tower, then proceed as above.


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Inge Zwitserlood, UiL OTS
Trans 10                        Fort Orthenlaan 13
3512 JK  UTRECHT                5231 PZ 's-HERTOGENBOSCH
030 - 253 83 13                 073 - 642 40 43
inge.zwitserlood at let.uu.nl     izjo at hetnet.nl
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