"Impoverished" signed languages

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, BARBARA GERNER DE GARCIA wrote:

> A colleague visiting from Brazil, met a hearing teacher of the deaf
> yesterday from Mongolia. This teacher told her, among other things, that
> the local or indigenous sign language was very "poor" in terms of number
> of signs and that she believed the solution was to import signs from
> another signed language,possibly ASL (or perhaps import another sign
> language).

        They always do, don't they?  I wonder how long this ugly legacy of
colonialism will be with us.


>         My friend, I think, made a convincing argument against this. My
> question is, what does one say in this kind of situation. Some of us run
> into it often.

        I'd be interested in hearing your friend's response.  Here are
some of my thoughts.

        While I don't like the judgment implied by words like "poor," it's
possible that the signed language used in Mongolia doesn't have signs for
things like "enchilada," "X-bar theory" or "manta ray."  I'd venture to
say that it probably does have signs for all the concepts that the
Mongolian Deaf need in their day-to-day lives, and will invent or borrow
signs as needed.

        When teachers say things like this, they mean that the language
doesn't have signs for things the teacher wants to teach.  Some of these
concepts may even be useful to the students.

        This is a fairly common occurrence as Western technology and
teaching methods are brought to other cultures.  There are a couple
solutions to the problem.  One is to import another signed language; I
think we all agree that this would be a disservice to all the students who
are fluent in a perfectly good language, and be a tremendous blow to their
cultural pride.

        Another is the one that this Mongolian teacher suggested: borrow
lots of signs from other languages that are regarded as "more educated."
This has a long history in Western culture: the Russians and others borrow
technology words from English, the English and others borrow culture words
from the French, the English and French from Latin and Arabic, and
everyone since the Romans has borrowed from the Ancient Greeks.

        Borrowing from Latin and Ancient Greek has the advantage that
these are dead languages.  Borrowing from living languages can further
feelings that the language is inferior.  The solution used with many
spoken languages is one called "corpus planning."  Leaders of the speech
community get together with a list of unexpressable concepts and make up
new words.  Usually they create compounds from existing words.  Sometimes
they borrow from more neutral languages.

        They then publish the results, and hope that people will use their
new words.  This is what the Academie Francaise does.  Sometimes it works:
people now use "logiciel" instead of "software."  Sometimes it doesn't: I
don't remember hearing anyone call a hamburger an "hambourgeois" the whole
year I spent in France.

        The solution for your Mongolian teacher, then, is to find the
Academy of Mongolian Sign Language, or some other suitable authority, and
ask them to come up with new signs.  What if no suitable authority can be
found?  Ask the students.  It's a perfect exercise to increase students'
linguistic competence: have them come up with the signs themselves.  The
teacher could even share these new signs with other teachers around
Mongolia so that the students can be sure they'll be understood when they
use these signs.

        Will the teacher do this?  The teacher would have to be humble
enough to listen to students.  If a teacher is already convinced that the
language is "poor," it may be difficult to overcome this prejudice.  I
hope others can share their experiences overcoming prejudice.  Strictly
speaking, it's not a linguistic issue, but it's one that linguists who
deal with society should be familiar with.

                                -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
                                Linguistics Department
                                The University of New Mexico
                                grvsmth at unm.edu