USU starting new deaf ed. program for kids under 5

Herald Journal, Logan, Utah, Saturday April 28, 2007

Anna Bolingbroke looks like any other 6-year-old girl until she pushes back her long brown hair and reveals the cochlear implants behind her ears.

The small magnetic pad and thin cables connect to her auditory nerves, allowing the once deaf child to hear normally.

Before receiving implants, Anna's parents never imagined she would be able to speak, let alone recite nursery rhymes. But on Friday, she stood before 100 people at Utah State University and shyly said the lines to "Little Miss Muffet".

The scene looked like a simple miracle, but in fact it took years of hard work.

As a toddler, Anna attended the Moog School in St. Louis, which focuses on teaching language skills to children with cochlear implants. The curriculum prepared her for a mainstream kindergarten class.

At Friday's meeting, USU announced that it is launching a similar program to help hearing-impaired children from birth to age 5. Called "Sound Beginnings of Cache Valley," the $3 million initiative will have an auditory-oral focus, meaning the program will concentrate on developing speaking rather than sign language, according to program director Todd Houston**. It is the first of its kind in the Intermountain West.

"It's so exciting that USU will be offering this," said Margene Bolingbroke, Anna's mother. "USU can be a leader not only in signing deaf education but also in oral deaf education."

When the Bolingbrokes discovered Anna's hearing impairment, and that of her 8-year-old brother, Nathan, they were living in Brigham City. A lack of services for individuals with cochlear implants motivated their move to St. Louis.

Margene is glad that other families will now be able to stay in the state.

"When you get cochlear implants, it's like recovering from a stroke," she said. "You need to work to get back the functions, so you need experts in that."

For infants up to age 2, USU's program offers weekly meetings to help parents teach their children through play. At 2, the children join a Sound Beginnings play group, which will meet weekly for two hours.

From 3 to 5, they are part of a tuition-free , early childhood educational program housed on USU's campus. The full-day, full-week school will have space for five to ten children and offer daily access to specialists in early childhood deaf education, pediatric audiology and seech-language pathology. All services begin in fall 2007.

Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education department head Beth Foley stressed that the program will provide an alternative for deaf children and their families, but will not replace the department's existing sign language training program.

"An oral-auditory focus is right for some families and not right for others," she said. "We already have a strong sign-language program. Now we are expanding the options we have out there for parents."

Huston agreed.

"Parents can, and should, be able to choose how they want to communicate with their children," he continued. "The fact is that 95 percent of all newborns with permanent hearing loss are born to hearing parents, and with all of the advances in the field, most of these parents want to communicate via spoken language. Many parents are now choosing to get their children cochlear implants, and these children need intensive follow-up training and services to take full advantage of this technology."

Several audience members expressed concern that the school would try to prevent their children from using sign language. School director, Vicki Simonsmeier explained that the school is not against sign language. All of the school's staff will know some sign language and will respond verbally to signed requests. Deaf parents can visit the class with a sign language interpreter, provided by USU.

"We view this as a collaborative program with existing services that also cover ASL (American Sign Language," Simonsmeir said.

For more information about Sound Beginning or to enroll a child, contact the USU Department of Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education, [435] 797-7554, or the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, [435] 797-1224, or e-mail Vicki. simonsmeier@usu.edu or
diane.behl@usu.edu


E-mail: kburgess@hjnews.com (editor)

**Todd Houston was Vice President of Alexander Graham Bell Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing before became Director of Sound Beginning of Cache Valley, a PRO Oralism preschool that DENIED American Sign Language to be use in their classrooms.

--------COMMUNITY RESPONSES--------

----Sign language wrongly ignored----

To the editor:

I am one of those “deaf parents” who stood up and commented concerning sign language not being used in the Sound Beginnings of Cache Valley. I understand that they are offering alternative services for those children with hearing loss such as my son, but as you look around, there is no other choice in Cache Valley except the Sound Beginnings, which is not right.

I am one of those two million Deaf Americans who look at deafness without shame. We look at ourselves as an ethic group rather than a group with disability or a group that needs their hearing to be fixed, which is how Sound Beginnings looks at us. We are rich in culture, folklore, history, heritage, and language.

We are similar to African-Americans and other ethic groups in the United States that, unfortunately, have gone through persecution and discrimination, except that ours have not been as violent as others. Such persecution and discrimination is easily seen at the meeting with Sound Beginnings of Cache Valley as they underestimate sign language and in fact ban them from using it in their classroom. That is an action of genocide. By focusing on speech only they rob us of our culture, heritage and easily accessible language, ASL. American Sign Language (ASL) was proven by William Stokoe to be a true and natural language in 1979. It is not inferior to any spoken language, but is made to look so by programs such as Sound Beginnings.

I wonder if I should walk in a classroom with hearing children who wanted to learn sign language as is found among parents of infants and/or toddlers. If I follow Sound Beginning of Cache Valley, I would simply ban them from using their native language, English, and begin to teach them sign language with the assistance of technology such as robotic parts installed in their hands in order to get them to make the right sign. How would you feel? That’s exactly what we feel; we do not need technology to fix our ears.

I have never spoken one word in my lifetime but am able to maintain above a 3.5 GPA at USU. What is wrong with sign language? What is wrong being deaf? Nothing; as for someone seeking for “normal” status such as parents with deaf children, may I ask, what is normal? Is a left-handed person normal in contrast to a right-handed? Are person’s skin colors normal such as olive, peach, brown, etc.? Is a person normal with or without eyeglasses or eye contacts? What is normal anyway?

James

-----Sign Language-----

To the Editor:

A cochlear implant is not simply a “magnetic pad and thin cables” connected to the auditory nerve. It is an electronic device implanted beneath the skin during an invasive surgery. The magnetic pad and thin cable are the visible part. Cochlear implants do not restore normal hearing. They simulate sounds. Children with cochlear implants will never have normal hearing.

This information is clearly explained by cochlear implant companies. A child born deaf will always be deaf even if they use hearing aids or have a cochlear implant. The fact is, if they do hear some sound (through assistive technology) it is not what we, as hearing people, are used to hearing.

This, however, does not impede the deaf child. I am a mother of a deaf child. He is 9 months old and can say the words, “more,” “please,” and “milk.” He uses his hands to say these words. I understand him and give him what he needs. When my child is ready for preschool he will have over 300 signs. However there is no preschool classroom in Cache Valley where my child will be able to go and have someone understand him and be able to respond in his own language (American Sign Language) to teach him the same things other children are learning. We can choose to send him to a special education classroom taught by someone with limited sign skills or send him to the new program, Sound Beginnings, that USU is starting fall 2007. Although many of the staff of this new program may know “some sign,” it will not be used in the program to enhance my son’s learning. When he signs, his teachers would not understand him, would not be able to respond back and build on the language he is giving them.

The Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education department has said that with this program they are expanding the existing program they have and offering more options for parents of deaf children. I see no option for my son. There is no classroom where he can go and learn to speak as well as learn emergent literacy skills, social skills, and basic knowledge of the world around him through a language that is easily accessible to him. Why not provide a Bilingual/ Bicultural approach where deafness is accepted, not shunned.

Where a child is allowed an accessible language (ASL) as well as taught to read, write and speak English. If allowed, deaf children will excel in both ASL and English, growing up to be fully active adults contributing to society in a truly unique and wonderful way. Deaf children in Cache Valley need this opportunity.

Lynell

----Outright Lies----

To the Editor:

Outright lies were spoken at the meeting about an oral education program for deaf kids less than five years old, called Sound Beginnings of Cache Valley, which was held last Friday, April 27th at USU.

The first lie is all deaf children all over the United States speak well. My speech was awful until adulthood despite my speech training I got from infancy through 8th grade. Many more deaf have far worse speech than I.

The second lie is all deaf children are happily mainstreamed at public schools and have normal relationships with hearing pupils. I notice the movie, shown at the Sound Beginnings of Cache Valley meeting, omits deaf children in middle and high school years. I had fun playing with neighborhood children daily until I was eleven, when they switched from playing kid games to mostly chatting. They excluded me from chats due to my poor lip-reading skills. One day we walked around our block, smelling flowers. While I was bending down and smelling them, they all ran off. I just walked home and became best friends with books from then on.

The third lie is once children learn to speak, they stop signing. I attended an intensive oral school from three years old to fourteen years old. At reunions every five years, all 250 or so of us but three alumni students use ASL despite their good speech!

The fourth lie is that Cochlear Implants are helpful. If that is the case then why there are so many deaf people get rid of theirs when they reach adulthood?

The fifth lie is that Savannah and other two children shown on the video and in person who shows up at the meeting all started with American Sign Language (ASL) and then progressed to good speech. What about those who didn’t started with ASL? It took me SIX months to learn how to pronounce my first word, “ball.” What a waste of time! In contrast deaf children exposed to ASL usually have a vocabulary in ASL equals to a hearing children’s spoken vocabulary. Those who know ASL learned to speak faster because receptive language skills precede expressive skills, and ASL is visual and easier to understand than oral speech that is largely invisible to the deaf.

The sixth lie is oral children are successful in the hearing world. Then why did Utah School for the Deaf and Blind, who supports oral/auditory approach more than other approaches, often fails to produce college-bound students for so long? Oral education still limits students’ access to communication in the classrooms. I was the only deaf in my school from 9th grade through college and got generally 2.7 GPA in high school but mostly 2.0 GPA at college. After I learned ASL at age of 20 years old and attended graduate school with interpreter services, I got 4.0 GPA, thanks to my enhanced access to communication.

Susan

The Morse Code

- .... . -- --- .-. ... . -.-. --- -.. .

My eyes widen with eyebrow bent and my lips tighten as I desperately sign American Sign Language (ASL) to my teacher, “Bathroom!!” She simply responded in signs using Manually Coded English (MCE) system, “No, you may not go to the bathroom. You have to say it this way, ‘May I go to the Restroom’ then you may go.” I shrink my eyes and looked at my five years old hands, my identity, which my parents gave to me. I look up to the teacher and begin to sign, “Go bathroom can?” with my eyebrow bent in question. She responds, “No, you can not go to the restroom. You have to go back to your seat and sit down. Maybe I will let you go if you sign properly.” I sit down and before I can bear, the foul smell begins to fill the room. Teacher covers her nose and begins to smell each student. When she came to me, she was overwhelmed by the smell then put her hand on my ear and drags me into bathroom. She commanded, “You must clean yourself up and also you will not have lunch today.”

Since the late 19th century, American Sign Language was banned and not used generally in educational settings for deaf children in the United States even though it is a complete and natural language. Instead of using ASL in classrooms, MCE was introduced and taught. The United States Department of Health and Human Services explained, “MCE is made up of signs that are a visual code for spoken English. You may have heard of Morse code. Morse code is a system of dots and dashes that can be tapped out to form English words and phrases. MCE is a code for a language – the English language.”[1] Thus MCE is an ineffective method to teach deaf children because “[MCE] models are lacking in the grammar of manual/visual language” (Bahan, Hoffmeister, & Lane 1996). MCE is not based on any independent language, just like Morse code. Morse code relies on English to relay the message to the opposite party. It is much the same for MCE, as it depends on English to relay information to deaf people, even though they do not have fluency in, or do not fully understand spoken English due to lack of ability to hear it and pronounce it.

MCE systems are not natural language; instead, it was invented by “… borrowing signs from ASL and use them in an English-like signing system. Some of these systems invent new sign symbols to represent English words and their suffixes such as ed, ing, ful, or ness. These inventions are often not conceptually understandable to Deaf people because facial expression and body movement is not used to indicate grammatical functions in these systems.”[2] Imagine a school where Morse code was used, intending to educate students on various topics such as science and history. Students would not acquire much knowledge by using Morse code as it couldn’t be used to express a full context of such ideas. The situation with Morse code in education setting is exactly what occurs in every classroom where MCE is used.

Despite several attempts and researches made by educators and professionals, MCE is not a successful method when attempting to educate deaf children in schools. The “Forms of Manually Coded English such as SEE (Signing Exact English), developed by educators to represent English on the hands, are cumbersome to use, do not adequately represent either English or ASL” (Kluwin, 1981). MCE is not just “cumbersome” but it has “been designed to convey, insofar as possible, the detailed structure and grammar of the spoken language [English].”(Freeman et.al 1981)[3] Educators believe MCE will work effectively because it is, as they call it, a “visible English language;” however, MCE systems were created based on spoken English rather than a spatial, visual language. Deaf rely on their eyes to absorb information in their environment just as a hearing people rely on their ears to understand happenings and proceedings in their environment. It is natural for a hearing person to depend on their ears even when someone comes to him or her and uses his or her hands to communicate. It is natural for deaf people to depend on their eyes, not ears.

MCE is not ideal for development and use in communication or for language acquisition as Francois Grosjean at University of Neuchatel, Switzerland explains, “The total absence of language [orals], the adoption of a non-natural language [MCE systems] or the use of a language that is poorly perceived or known, can have major negative consequences on the child’s cognitive development.”[4] Thus MCE systems oppress deaf children, not allowing them to develop and use their native, easily accessed language, ASL. MCE is like a house with several different rooms but no foundation.

A Journey into the Deaf-world talking about language literacy stated: “There is no way the Deaf child can nativize from an MCE system to develop any true language, signed or otherwise.” (Bahan, Hoffmeister, & Lane 1996) Imagine ourselves writing and speaking in the Morse code system. Would we understand each other fully? I doubt it because all we could do is print dots and dashes; Morse code doesn’t contain expression, emotions, or tone of voice that naturally attracts the listener. Morse code doesn’t have any structured grammar; likewise, MCE doesn’t include any type of facial expression nor does it contain syntax, grammar, lexicon or any type of expressions that are necessary to emphasize the message.

MCE is not a language itself and should be replaced by ASL, as ASL is the most effective method to teach deaf children. The Deaf Community Advocacy Network stated that, “ASL is not based on, nor is it derived from, the English language, either written or spoken. ASL has its own grammar, syntax, lexicon, facial expressions, and body language.”[5] An author could paint a picture in English using various words and grammar. ASL can paint picture through various signs and concepts which is not possible for someone who uses MCE, just as it would be impossible to do with Morse code. ASL is “a visual, gestural language created by Deaf people and used by approximately one-half million Deaf Americans and Canadians of all ages” (Baker & Padden, 1978). Definitely, ASL is the third language most commonly used in the United States. The most important reason ASL should be taught in school is that it has a complete language structure like any other language such as Spanish, English, and so on.

I was born deaf and had access to ASL through my parents, who are also deaf. I also interacted with my three deaf brothers. Because I had a strong culture and ASL language influence in my childhood, I was able to succeed in schools and accompany other students in same grade level. However, I struggled because I was oppressed by educators who attempted to change my already developed language to a MCE system. MCE no longer needs to be used to teach the English language to deaf people. Instead, we should release ASL to deaf people as it belongs to them.

[1] “A Parent’s Guide to Hearing Loss”, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Early Hearing Detection and Intervention Program (http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/ehdi/CDROM/index.html)
[2] “ASL, MCE, & PSE: Definition of Manually Coded English” Deaf Community Advocacy Network (DEAF C.A.N.!) [Sylvan Lake, Michigan] (http://www.deafcan.org/ASLMCEPSE.htm)
[3] Roger Freeman, Clifton F. Carbin, Robert J. Boese, Can’t Your Child Hear? A Guide for Those Who Care about Deaf Children, (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1981), p. 132
[4] “The Right of the Deaf Child to Grow Up Bilingual” Francois Grosjean, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, Pg. 28, Winter 2000.
[5] “ASL, MCE, & PSE: Definition of American Signed Language” Deaf Community Advocacy Network [Michigan] (http://www.deafcan.org/ASLMCEPSE.htm)

Deaf Chipmunk: Crime Against Deaf

Deaf Chipmunk: Crime Against Deaf

Why Fix It If It Isn't Broken?

http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/culture4.htm
Submitted by Jane Brown11/06/04

Hearing people have a reality that incorporates sound. For hearing people, the ability to hear, like any other sense, is cherished. With this in mind, it's a common assumption that the hearing view the deaf as handicapped. As most hearing people believe, a reality that does not incorporate sound is assumed an unfortunate incompleteness. According to deaf people, this assumption is far from the truth.

Most deaf people value their deafness just as those who hear value their hearing. To take it even further, the deaf classify themselves as having their own culture, defined as "deaf culture," and use American Sign Language as their form of communication (Young, 2002).

King Jordan, President of Gallaudet University, the only deaf and hard of hearing school in the world, argues that when he's in the hearing world, he's considered different (Bowser, 2001). But when he's among the deaf community, he's noted for his individual talents aside from his deafness (Bowser, 2001).

Cathy Young in her article, "Does Curing Deafness Really Mean Cultural Genocide?," compares deafness to homosexuality (Young, 2002). Those who don't understand homosexuality believe that it's a condition that should be fixed (Young, 2002). Gay activists work to remove the negative connotation that homosexuals suffer from (Young, 2002). Deaf activists are working toward the same goal (Young, 2002). They are educating those who believe that deafness is a deficiency (Young, 2002).

Because hearing people believe that deafness is a deficiency, they work to correct the problem. Through science, Cochlear Implants have been invented (Allen, 2000). The implants are electronic devices that allow the deaf to perceive sound (Allen, 2000). The implants are becoming very popular. The deaf culture feels threatened, however, and believes that the implants are undermining their culture (Bowser, 2001). If they had a choice, they would choose to be deaf (Bowser, 2001). Furthermore, the deaf culture believes that those who are profiting from the implants do so with no regard or consideration of the deaf culture (Allen, 2000).

The deaf culture needs no sympathy (Bowser, 2001). They are angered when people pity them (Bowser, 2001). People who feel sorry for the deaf don't understand that the deaf are fully capable of functioning without the help of others, that they are able to live normal lives (Bowser, 2001).

Jason Lamberton, a 20 year old student, confesses that hearing would make life easier but then argues that if he were to hear and speak, it would ruin his identity (Bowser, 2001) Deaf people have the same successes as hearing people do (Bowser, 2001). They are happy (Bowser, 2001). They don't believe their deafness is an issue (Bowser, 2001).

Gallaudet student council president, Chris Soukup, argues that the deaf culture "involves an acceptance and a celebration of who we are as people, and it's also a celebration of all of the accomplishments that we've made since the beginning of time. We have done so much for ourselves in terms of progressing and advancing as a community, and also asserting, you know, the culture that we believe very strongly in to the outside world." (Bowser, 2001).

It's difficult to understand other people's reality. We're ignorant when we make assertions based on assumptions. Becoming informed about different cultures builds a better understanding and respect for others. It helps us to become a more tolerant and cohesive society.

References:

Allen, Arthur. (2000, May 24).

Sound and Fury. Salon.com. Retrieved 6, Nov. 2004: Bowser, Betty Ann. (2001, Feb 19).

Technology and Deaf Culture. PBS. Retrieved 6, Nov. 2004: Young, Cathy. (2002, April).

Does Curing Deafness Really Mean Cultural Genocide? Reasononline. Retrieved 3, Nov. 2004: <http://reason.com/0204/co.cy.sound.shtml>

Minority Languages in the World and Status of Linguistic Human Rights

Introduction by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Dr.Phil.

"Visible Signs of Europe: sign languages in a multicultural European Union".E. U. D. Sign Languages Day, 6 December, 2001, European Parliament, Brussels.

1. Number of Languages.
Most linguists say that there are around 6-7,000 languages. The most useful source, The Ethnologue (see www.sil.org/ethnologue/), lists in its latest version over 6,800 languages in 228 countries. But there might be even twice as many: 12-14,000 languages. There are deaf people in all societies, and where hearing people have developed spoken languages, the Deaf have developed Sign languages, fully-fledged, complex, abstract languages (see Branson & Miller 1998, 2000, for brilliant analyses of the treatment of Sign languages; see Alden 2001, Jokinen 2000, Krausneker 1998, Lane 1980, 1992, Skutnabb-Kangas 1994, in press, for the (lack of) L.H.Rs. of Sign language users). Those who speak about "languages" but in fact mean spoken languages only, participate through invisibilising sign languages in killing maybe half the linguistic diversity on earth. Europe is poor on linguistic diversity. [1] If we do not count recent immigrants, we have only some 3% of the world's spoken languages, provided the Russian Federation is counted in (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Chapter 1, for details). The seven most linguistically diverse countries in the world (Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Cameroon, Australia, Mexico), each have more languages than the whole of Europe. Papua New Guinea alone, with some 5 million people, has three times as many languages as Europe, and they use 470 of those languages as the languages of instruction in the first grades of their elementary schools (Klaus, in press). Still, the E. U. prides itself in having linguistic and cultural diversity as a hallmark of Europe.

2. Number of Speakers.
How many users/(native) speakers do the various languages have? Table 2 shows the top twenty languages by population (from The Ethnologue, February 1999). The world's top 10 languages in terms of the number of speakers account for close to 50% of the world's oral population but they represent only 0.10 - 0.15% of the world's spoken languages.

Most of the world's languages are spoken by relatively few people (Table 3). The median number of speakers is probably around 5-6,000 per language (Posey 1997). The 60 languages with more than 10 million speakers taken together account for far over 4 billion people. Over 95% of the world's spoken languages have fewer than 1 million native users. A quarter of the world's spoken languages and most of the Sign languages have fewer than 1,000 users.

3. Languages are more threatened than biodiversity — only 5-10% of the languages left (= unthreatened) in 2100?

Languages are today being murdered faster than ever before in human history, and linguistic diversity is disappearing much faster than biodiversity. A language is threatened if it has few users and a weak political status, and, especially, if children are no longer learning it, i.e., when the language is no longer transmitted to the next generation. Even the most "optimistic realistic" linguists now estimate that half of today's oral languages may have disappeared or at least not be learned by children in a 100 years' time, whereas the "pessimistic but realistic" researchers estimate that we may only have some 10% of today's oral languages (or even 5%, some 300 languages) left as vital, non-threatened languages in the year 2100 (see Krauss 1992).

A comparison of estimates is as follows (Table 4; see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000 for details). Optimistic: 2% of biological species but 50% of languages may be dead (or moribund) in a hundred years' time. Pessimistic: 20% of biological species but 90-95% of languages may be dead (or moribund) in a hundred years' time.

While new trees can be planted and ecological habitats restored, it is much more difficult to restore languages once they have been murdered. What happens is linguistic genocide on a massive scale, with formal education and media as the main concrete culprits but with the world's political, economic and military structures as the more basic causal factors. Big languages turn into killer languages, monsters that gobble up others, when they are learned at the cost of the smaller ones. Instead, they should and could be learned in addition to the various mother tongues.

New research shows that biodiversity and linguistic and cultural diversity are related, both correlationally and causally. [2] Linguistic and biological megadiversity countries overlap to a large extent. Where we have many biological species, mammals, birds, reptiles, amfibians, flowering plants, butterflies, we usually also have many languages (Harmon 1995, in press). But the various types of diversities do also mutually influence and support each other (Posey 1999, Maffi, 2000a, b, 2001, Maffi et al. 1999). Much of the information about the ecological relationships and about how to maintain and use some of the most vulnerable and most biologically rich and diverse environments in the world sustainably is encoded in the many indigenous spoken and signed languages. If these disappear, vital knowledge about the world also disappears: the knowledge is not transferred to the bigger languages that replace the smaller ones (Maffi et al., 1999, Mühlhäusler 1996).

In order to adapt to the massive changes in today's globalisation, we people need more adaptability than ever. Diversity is a prerequisite for this adaptability, for the new ways of coping that we need. I quote from Colin Baker's review of Skutnabb-Kangas 2000 (Baker 2001: 281; see also Crystal 2000, Nettle & Romaine 2000):

Ecological diversity is essential for long-term planetary survival. All living organisms, plants, animals, bacteria and humans survive and prosper through a network of complex and delicate relationships. Damaging one of the elements in the ecosystem will result in unforeseen consequences for the whole of the system. Evolution has been aided by genetic diversity, with species genetically adapting in order to survive in different environments. Diversity contains the potential for adaptation. Uniformity can endanger a species by providing inflexibility and unadaptability. Linguistic diversity and biological diversity are...inseparable. The range of cross fertilisation becomes less as languages and cultures die and the testimony of human intellectual achievement is lessened.In the language of ecology, the strongest ecosystems are those that are the most diverse. That is, diversity is directly related to stability; variety is important for long-term survival. Our success on this planet has been due to an ability to adapt to different kinds of environment over thousands of years (atmospheric as well as cultural). Such ability is born out of diversity. Thus language and cultural diversity maximises chances of human success and adaptability.

If we, during the next 100 years, murder 50-90% of the linguistic (and thereby mostly also the cultural) diversity which is our treasury of historically developed knowledge, we are also seriously undermining our chances of life on earth. Killing linguistic diversity is then, just as the killing of biodiversity, dangerous reductionism. Maximal diversity is our life insurance. And it is especially languages that are maximally different from others that are important to maintain. Relatively speaking, therefore, Sign languages may, because of their differences from spoken languages, contain more so far untapped important information for our futures than many of the spoken languages, especially the big ones.

4. Linguistic Genocide in Education.
Multilingualism is a prerequisite for the maintenance of linguistic diversity because speakers of small languages of course need to learn bigger languages also. Therefore, high levels of multilingualism should be among the most important goals in all formal and informal education. But so far, formal education has been the most important direct agent in killing indigenous and minority languages, by forcibly transferring minority language children to dominant language groups and by preventing children from developing their full cognitive potential in situations where minority children do not understand the language of instruction. This fits the U. N. definitions on linguistic and cultural genocide, according to Articles II (e) and (b) of the U. N. International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E793, 1948):

Article II (e), "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group"; and Article II (b), "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" (emphasis added).
Likewise, most minority education is guilty of linguistic genocide according to the 1948 special definition (not part of the present Convention).

Article III (1) "Prohibiting the use of the language of the group in daily intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of publications in the language of the group".

For oral minority students education through the medium of a dominant majority language leads to the students using the dominant language with their own children later on (e.g., Janulf 1998), i.e., over a generation or two the children are linguistically and often in other ways too forcibly transferred to a dominant group; they are linguistically and culturally assimilated. The transfer to the majority language speaking group happens by force; it is not voluntary. For it to be voluntary, alternatives should exist, namely schools or classes which teach mainly through the medium of the threatened indigenous or minority languages. And parents would need to have enough reliable information about the long-term consequences of the various choices. None of these conditions are usually fulfilled for indigenous or minority parents and children, i.e., the situations where children lose their first language, can often be characterised as genocide (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000 for these claims). Since most Deaf children are born to hearing parents, their situation is different here, though. Parents and children do not have the same mother tongue, and many of the Deaf children are in their turn going to have hearing children. In Table 5, I compare the forcible transfer that happens in education for two groups: oral indigenous or minority children who are taught through the medium of a dominant or majority language, and Deaf children of hearing parents who are taught through oral methods, i.e., taught lip-reading and speaking in a dominant majority language, to the exclusion of a Sign language. This is the predominant method in oralism. Oralism is still a dominant feature in the teaching of Deaf children in most countries, even if a few do receive bilingual education with Sign language as one of the languages of instruction. [3]

Cochlear implants may also come under the forcible transfer of children to another group — this is as yet unclarified. There is also a wealth of research and statistics about the mental harm that forced assimilation causes in education and otherwise (see, e.g., Baugh 1996, 2000, Jordan 1988, Kouritzin 1998, Wong Fillmore 1991, Skutnabb-Kangas 1984, 2000). As most Deaf people would be prepared to witness, assimilationist submersion education where minorities are taught through the medium of dominant languages, where for instance Deaf students are taught orally only and where Sign languages have no place in the curriculum, often causes mental harm, including serious prevention or delay of cognitive growth potential. For Deaf children the harm caused is obviously still much greater than for oral children, since trying to force Deaf children to become oral only, to the exclusion of Sign languages and preventing them from fully developing a Sign language in formal education, deprives them of the chance of learning through this education the only type of language through which they can fully express themselves. Since they do not share this mother tongue with their parents, they are completely dependent on formal education to really develop it to the highest possible level. As a result, Deaf researchers claim that many Deaf people do not have proper command of any language (e.g., Markku Jokinen, personal communication, 22 November, 2001). [4]

All forms of genocide are crimes against humanity. Oralism in formal education is an instance of linguistic genocide. Therefore, oralism in the formal education of Deaf children is a crime against humanity.

Educational L.H.Rs. which guarantee additive language learning are needed for preventing linguistic genocide and for linguistic diversity to be maintained on earth.

5. Linguistic Human Rights as a possible counterweight?
The right to mother tongue medium education is the most important linguistic human right if we are interested in maintaining linguistic and cultural diversity on our planet.

But even the most recent human rights instruments are completely insufficient in guaranteeing the most important linguistic human rights, not only to Deaf and Sign language users but to linguistic minorities in general. International and European binding Covenants, Conventions and Charters give very little support to linguistic human rights in education (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1994). Language receives in them a much poorer treatment than other central human characteristics. Often, language disappears completely in binding educational paragraphs; for instance, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) where the paragraph on education (26) does not refer to language at all. Similarly, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted in 1966 and in force since 1976), having mentioned language on a par with race, colour, sex, religion, etc. in its general Article (2.2), omits reference to language or linguistic groups in its educational Article (13.1):
...education shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society, promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups... (emphasis added).

When language IS in educational paragraphs of human rights instruments, the Articles dealing with education, especially the right to mother tongue medium education, are more vague and/or contain many more opt-outs and modifications than any other Articles (see, e.g., Kontra et al., eds., 1999; Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994, 1995, 1996; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996a, b, 1999, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1994, 1997, 1998). I will show you just one example of how language in education gets a different treatment from everything else, from the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities from 1992 (adopted by the General Assembly in December 1992), most of the Articles use the obligating formulation "shall" and have few let-out modifications or alternatives — except where linguistic rights in education are concerned. Compare the unconditional formulation in Article 1 about identity, with the education Article 4.3: 1.1. States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their respective territories, and shall encourage conditions for the promotion of that identity.1.2. States shall adopt appropriate legislative and other measures to achieve those ends.4.3. States should take appropriate measures so that, wherever possible, persons belonging to minorities have adequate opportunities to learn their mother tongue or to have instruction in their mother tongue. (Emphases added, "obligating" in italics, "opt-outs" in bold type).

The same types of formulation as in Art. 4.3 abound even in the latest H.Rs. instruments. Minority languages, and sometimes even their speakers, MIGHT, "as far as possible", and "within the framework of [the State's] education systems", receive some vaguely defined rights, or "appropriate measures", or "adequate opportunities", "if there is sufficient demand" and "substantial numbers", or "pupils who so wish in a number considered sufficient", or "if the number of users of a regional or minority language justifies it". All these examples come from the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, both in force since 1999. The Articles covering medium of education are so heavily qualified that the minority is completely at the mercy of the state (see also Thornberry 1997). It is clear that the opt-outs and alternatives in the Convention and the Charter permit a reluctant state to meet the requirements in a minimalist way, which it can legitimate by claiming that a provision was not "possible" or "appropriate", or that numbers were not "sufficient" or did not "justify" a provision, or that it "allowed" the minority to organise teaching of their language as a subject, at their own cost.
Still, the human rights system should protect people in the globalisation process rather than giving market forces free range. Human rights, especially economic and social rights, are, according to human rights lawyer Katarina Toma_evski (1996: 104), to act as correctives to the free market. Toma_evski claims (ibid., 104) that the purpose of international human rights law is...to overrule the law of supply and demand and remove price tags from people and from necessities for their survival.

These necessities for survival include not only basic food, health and housing but also basics for the sustenance of a dignified life, including basic civil, political and cultural rights. Cultural rights include full linguistic human rights. Of course the rights need to be binding, there must be a duty-holder, and both a monitoring system and a proper complaint system need to be in place, with some kind of penalties for non-compliance. There are some recent positive developments (I list some of them in Note 5, below) but no results are in sight yet, and there is little reason to be optimistic.

Summing up, then, learning new languages should be additive rather than subtractive. Education should add to people's linguistic repertoires. So far, human rights instruments and discussions about both them and about educational language rights have not even started addressing these big questions in a coherent way where all types of ecology would be discussed within an integrated political and economic framework. When speakers of small languages learn other, necessary, languages in addition to their native languages, they become multilingual, and the maintenance of linguistic diversity, necessary for the planet, is supported. When dominant languages, like English, are learned subtractively, at the cost of the mother tongues, they become killer languages.

References:
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Baker, Colin (2001). Review of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas Linguistic genocide in education ­- or worldwide diversity and human rights? Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5:2, May 2001, 279-283.
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Baugh, John (2000). "Educational Malpractice and the Miseducation of Language Minority Students". In Hall, Joan Kelly & Eggington, William G. (eds.). The Sociopolitics of English Language Teaching. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 104-116.
Branson, Jan & Miller, Don (1998). "Nationalism and the linguistic rights of Deaf communities: linguistic imperialism and the recognition and development of sign languages". Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2:1, 1998, 3-34.
Branson, Jan and Miller, Don (2000). "Maintaining, Developing and Sharing the Knowledge and Potential Embedded in all our Languages and Cultures: on linguists as agents of epistemic violence". In Phillipson (ed.), 28-32.
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Harmon, David (1995). "The status of the world's languages as reported in The Ethnologue". Southwest Journal of Linguistics 14:1&2, 1-28.
Harmon, David (in press). In Light of Our Differences: how diversity in nature and culture makes us human. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institute Press.
Janulf, Pirjo (1998). "Kommer finskan i Sverige att fortleva? En studie av språkkunskaper och språkanvändning hos andragenerationens sverigefinnar i Botkyrka och hos finlandssvenskar i Åbo". (Will Finnish survive in Sweden? A study of language skills and language use among second generation Sweden Finns in Botkyrka, Sweden, and Finland Swedes in Åbo, Finland). Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Studia Fennica Stockholmiensia 7. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Jokinen, Markku (2000). "The linguistic human rights of Sign language users". In Phillipson (ed.), 203-213.
Jordan, Deirdre (1988). "Rights and claims of indigenous people. Education and the reclaiming of identity: the case of the Canadian natives, the Saami and Australian Aborigines". In Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Cummins, Jim (Eds.). Minority education: from shame to struggle. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 189-222.
Klaus, David (in press). "The use of indigenous languages in early basic education in Papua New Guinea: a model for elsewhere?" To appear in Language and Education. An International Journal.
Kontra, Miklós, Phillipson, Robert, Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Várady, Tibor (eds.) (1999). Language: a right and a resource. Approaching Linguistic Human Rights. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Kouritzin, Sandra (1999). Face[t]s of first language loss. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Krausneker, Verena (1998). Sign Languages in the Minority Languages Policy of the European Union. M.A. Thesis, September 1998. Vienna: University of Vienna.
Krauss, Michael (1992). "The World's Languages in Crisis". Language, 68:1, 4-10.
Lane, Harlan (1980). "A Chronology of the Oppression of Sign Language in France and the United States". In Lane, Harlan & Grosjean, François (eds.). Recent Perspectives on American Sign Language. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 119-161.
Lane, Harlan (1992). The Mask of Benevolence: disabling the Deaf community. New York: Alfred Knopf.
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Maffi, Luisa (2000b). "Language preservation vs. language maintenance and revitalization: assessing concepts, approaches, and implications for language sciences". International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 142. Dorian, Nancy C. (ed.). Small languages and small language communities, 175-190.
Maffi, Luisa, Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Andrianarivo, Jonah (1999). "Language diversity". In Posey (ed.), 19-57.
Maffi, Luisa (ed.) (2001). On Biocultural Diversity. Linking Language, Knowledge and the Environment. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institute Press.
Mühlhäusler, Peter (1996). Linguistic ecology. Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London: Routledge.
Nettle, Daniel & Romaine, Suzanne (2000). Vanishing Voices. The Extinction of the World's Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Phillipson, Robert (ed.) (2000). Rights to language. Equity, Power and Education. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Phillipson, Robert & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1994). "English — Panacea or Pandemic?" In Ammon, Ulrich, Mattheier, Klaus J. & Nelde, Peter (eds.). Sociolinguistica 8. English only? in Europa/ in Europe/ en Europe, 73-87.
Phillipson, Robert & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1995). "Linguistic rights and wrongs". Applied Linguistics, 16: 4, 483-504.
Phillipson, Robert & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1996). "English Only Worldwide, or Language Ecology". T.E.S.O.L. Quarterly. Ricento, Thomas & Hornberger, Nancy (eds). Special-Topic Issue — Language Planning and Policy, 429-452.
Posey, Darrell (ed.) (1999). Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. A Complementary Contribution to the Global Biodiversity Assessment. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, for and on behalf of the United Nations Environmental Programme.
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Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1984). Bilingualism or not — the education of minorities. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1994). "Linguistic Human Rights: a prerequisite for bilingualism". In Ahlgren, Inger & Hyltenstam, Kenneth (Eds.). Bilingualism in Deaf Education, International Studies on Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf, Vol. 27, Hamburg: Signum, 139-159.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1996a). "The colonial legacy in educational language planning in Scandinavia — from migrant labour to a national ethnic minority?" International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Vol. 118. Special Issue — Language Planning and Political Theory, Dua, Hans (ed.), 81-106.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1996b). "Educational language choice — multilingual diversity or monolingual reductionism?" In Hellinger, Marlis & Ammon, Ulrich (eds). Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 175-204.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1999). "Linguistic diversity, human rights and the 'free' market". In Kontra et al. (eds), 187-222.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2000). Linguistic genocide in education -­ or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, N.J. & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (in press). "Sprache und Menschenrechte (Language and Human Rights)". Das Zeichen.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Phillipson, Robert (1994). "Linguistic human rights, past and present". In Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson (eds.), 71-110.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Phillipson, Robert (1997). "Linguistic Human Rights and Development". In Hamelink, Cees J. (ed.). Ethics and Development. On Making Moral Choices in Development Co-operation. Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok. S. 56-69.
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Toma_evski, Katarina (1996). "International prospects for the future of the welfare state". In Reconceptualizing the welfare state. Copenhagen: The Danish Centre for Human Rights, 100-117.
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Notes:
1. The most recent book on the languages of Europe (Price 2000), describes some 275 languages, some of them extinct.
2. "Terralingua: partnerships for linguistic and biological diversity () is an "international organization devoted to preserving the world's linguistic diversity and investigating links between biological and cultural diversity". See our Web site for details of the claims.
3. Markku Jokinen (personal communication, 22 November, 2001) assesses that maybe one or two percent of the world's Deaf children receive bilingual education. In Europe this is true in the Nordic countries, with some experiments or single schools in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain. See also E.U.D. monthly updates, especially March & April 2001.
4. Many other linguistic human rights are, of course, also important for Sign language users. There are many other linguistic barriers, in relation to access to information, media, services, employment, etc. An international hearing in the Hague in May 1999 about the linguistic rights of several groups, among them the Deaf, concluded that "there is clear evidence of violations of basic linguistic human rights of the Deaf all over the world. Š The judges urge governments to consider granting full rights to Sign languages as official languages and to offer real bilingual education and public services to the Deaf". The judgement and summaries of the testimonies of the key witnesses have been published as a short monograph, called Linguicide. The Death of Language (1999). It is also available at and http://www.waag.org/pcc. Number 4, 1999, of the journal Media Development, is a special number on language rights, and it also summarises the Hearing.
5. Examples of positive recent human rights instruments, draft instruments, recommendations, declarations or comments:
1) U.N., Human Rights Committee: General Comment on U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 27 (4 April 1996, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.5).2) U.N., Working Group on Indigenous Populations: Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; www.unhchr.ch/html/menu4/subres/9445.htm.3) C.I.E.M.E.N. (Mercator Programme, Linguistic Rights and Law); The International Pen Club (Committee for Translation and Linguistic Rights): The draft Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (handed over to U.N.E.S.C.O. in June 1997); www.troc.es/ciemen/mercator/index-gb.htm.4) The Third World Network, Malaysia; The Cultural Environment Movement, U.S.A.; and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, A.M.A.R.C.: People's Communication Charter (including an International Hearing on Language Rights, in May 1999, in the Hague; www.waag.org/pcc.5) O.S.C.E., High Commissioner on National Minorities: The Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities & Explanatory Note; www.osce.org/.6) The 1997 Harare Declaration from an O.A.U. (Organisation for African Unity) Conference of Ministers on Language Policies in Africa.7) The Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures, 17 Jan., 2000 ; www.outreach.psu.edu/C&I/AllOdds/declaration.html.

Sign Languages — How the Deaf (and other Sign language users) are Deprived of their Linguistic Human Rights.

http://www.terralingua.org/DeafHR.html

Compiled by Dr. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas.

The European Union of the Deaf (E. U. D.) organised an E. U. D. SIGN LANGUAGES DAY on 6 December, 2001 at the European Parliament in Brussels, with close to 200 participants and several M.Ps. and M.E.Ps. (Members of the European Parliament) as speakers. Terralingua's Vice-President had been asked to introduce the topic. The goal was to discuss the linguistic human rights of Sign language users, especially the fact that no European state has so far included Sign languages in the languages for which they have ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The arguments used by the Council of Europe and by the various states to exclude Sign languages has been based on ignorance of the nature of Sign languages, and faulty logic. Skutnabb-Kangas presented and de-constructed these arguments in the panel discussion at the Sign Languages Day meeting, based on an extract "Arguments to Exclude Sign Languages from the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages" (from Skutnabb-Kangas, in press). The E. U. D. wants the states to amend this, and to treat Sign languages on a par with other minority languages. The conference passed the Resolution below; it is still awaiting its formal adoption by the E. U. D. General Assembly in June 2002. More on the E. U. D. on its Web site www.eudnet.org/. Questions and comments should be addressed to E. U. D.'s Director, Helga Stevens, at info@eudnet.org.

The following extract about basic concepts in discussing Sign languages and the Deaf (and Sign language users) (or the Visualists, as Brice Alden calls them, in 2001), comes from Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2000). Linguistic genocide in education — or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, New Jersey & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Chapter 4.

Definition Box 4.1. Some basics: pathological versus sociocultural ideologies of Deafness; "Deaf" vs. "deaf"; Sign languages vs. manually coded oral languages (Manual Sign Codes); manualists vs. oralists; Total Communication.

The pathological view sees deafness as an auditory deficiency, a handicap, a medical problem to be remedied so that the deaf person becomes as much like a hearing person as possible. Means used are teaching speech and lip-reading, hearing aids, cochlear implants, etc. The sociocultural view sees the Deaf as a sociocultural minority ("different" but not deficient) which shares characteristics with other minorities and where problems the Deaf face can be seen as human rights problems (see Reagan 1995a, and references to Branson & Miller in the bibliography).
In writing, "deaf" commonly "refers to deafness solely as an audiological condition" whereas "Deaf" describes deafness "as a cultural condition" (Reagan 1995a: 240) and the capitalisation is used just like for other cultural/linguistic groups (Hispanic, Greek-Australian). "Thus, a person can be "deaf" without being "Deaf" (as in the case of an older person who gradually loses his/her hearing)" (ibid.). Likewise, a deaf child of hearing parents who has no contact with any Deaf community is also "deaf", not "Deaf" — a tragic situation. And a person can be "Deaf" without being "deaf", as a bilingual bicultural person who grew up bilingually, as hearing, but with signing Deaf parents, and therefore as Sign language as (one of) the mother tongue(s). This is the group that the best interpreters often come from. Audiological deafness "is actually neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for cultural deafness", as Timothy Reagan formulates it (1995a: 244).

Sign languages are those natural languages that developed in Deaf communities approximately in the same way as spoken languages developed in hearing communities. Examples are AUSLAN (Australian Sign Language), A.S.L. (American Sign Language), or Swedish Sign Language. Even all these are in a way misnomers — they are the dominant, partially standardised, named Sign languages from the three countries concerned, but there are many other Sign languages in those countries. Sign languages are complex, abstract linguistic systems, with their own grammars. They have "a small closed set of distinctive features, meaningless in themselves which...combine in ways peculiar to [each] language to form morphemes, i.e., signs which denote meaning" (Stokoe 1974: 367). Sign languages combine the morphemes into meaningful "signs".

In analyzing a sign, the equivalent of the phoneme is the "chereme". Cheremic variation in individual signs plays precisely the same rôle in differentiating one sign from another as does phonological variation in distinguishing words from one another. In natural Sign languages, there are five parameters within which cheremic variations occur: (1) handshape(s); (2) location of sign; (3) palm orientation; (3) movement(s); and (5) nonmanual features (e.g., facial expressions, use of shoulders and body, and so on)... By changing the chereme in any one of these five areas, the meaning of a sign is altered (Reagan 1995b: 135).

Since the majority of signs, just like words in a spoken language, are fundamentally arbitrary, Sign languages are "no more mutually intelligible or 'universal' than would be comparable spoken languages" (Reagan 1995b: 134). This myth of them being mutually intelligible is partially based on a relatively small number of iconic signs which are comparable to onomatopoetic words in spoken languages (like "hiss" or "buzz" in English). Even iconic signs may be culture-specific. Timothy Reagan gives as an example the sign for "basket" in South African Sign languages: white signers indicate a basket carried by hand, while "many, especially rural, black signers will indicate a basket being carried on the head" (ibid., 136). There is also a partially planned lingua franca, International Sign language, to a large extent based on A.S.L.
Manual Sign Codes "seek to represent the lexical items of an oral/aural language", for instance Swedish or English, "in a gestural/visual linguistic context" (Reagan 1995b: 140). Thus, these "languages" are NOT Sign languages, but manually coded oral languages. It is thus important to remember the distinction between, e.g., Swedish Sign Language (the language of the Swedish Deaf community, i.e., a language which has evolved "naturally" among the community, just as oral languages have, with its own grammar, vocabulary, etc.), and signed Swedish, which uses manual sign codes for a spoken language, i.e., trying to imitate or represent spoken Swedish with manual codes. There is some terminological confusion here, because the expression "signed LANGUAGES" is sometimes also used about Sign languages if one needs to emphasize that they are just as complex as oral languages, i.e., to counteract the myth that they would not be full languages.

Manual sign codes are relatively recent, and have in most cases been used to teach a dominant oral language to deaf children. As tools for this second language teaching, they may be appropriate; likewise, they can be used as a lingua franca with deaf people who have lost their hearing. The ideology behind them, though, is the pathological one, and it hierarchises languages, with oral languages on top, Sign languages at the bottom, and manual sign codes as the in-between code, trying to bridge what is seen as a gap (see Reagan 1995b for a description of manual codes and the ideologies behind them). Most Deaf communities reject the use of manual sign codes (except, possibly, as tools for L2-learning) and see them as "awkward efforts to impose the structures of a spoken language on sign" (Reagan 1995a: 243) whereas there are various opinions among deaf people. "In A.S.L. there is actually a sign used to denigrate [sic ] a Deaf person who 'thinks like a hearing person', roughly comparable in use to the term "Uncle Tom" among African Americans", Timothy Reagan notes (ibid.: 244).

"Manualists" also has at least two meanings. The Latin "manus" means "hand", and in the more general meaning, manualists are the ones who see use of manual signs as normal or preferable — but these manual signs can be either Sign languages or, more often, manual sign codes. In the more restricted positive sense (e.g., Senghas 1998: 542), manualists are "those who consider Sign languages normal or most appropriate for deaf people". "Oralists" (Latin "os"; genitive "oris'' means "mouth") try to teach Deaf people to speak orally, in a subtractive way, to the exclusion of using Sign language and often forbidding the use of Sign languages.

Both oralists and manualists teach deaf people to lip-read, and to write, oralists subtractively, manualists mostly additively. "Total communication" supporters often try to combine lipreading, speaking and manual sign codes with varying amounts of Sign language use. But Sign language often has the same type of ideological status for them as the mother tongue with supporters of transitional bilingual education, i.e., it is used as a tool to make the transition to the dominant language easier and its full learning and use is not seen as a linguistic human right. In Neisser's (1983: 4, quoted in Reagan 1992: 314) terms total communication meant that "no change in philosophy took place; to all other methods, techniques, training, and curricula, signs were merely added".

See Appendices 21 and 22 with Resolutions from the XI World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf, 1991, detailing what the Deaf themselves want (in Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, eds., pp. 408-412).

Address Box 4.1. Deaf Resources.
Sign Language Resources:

The following list contains some useful addresses for obtaining more information about Deaf resources (see also Alverson 1997: 22-23):
The Deaf Resource Library www.deaflibrary.org/ — Deaf culture in the U.S.A. and Japan; many links; a search engine.
Singapore Association of the Deaf www.sad.org.sg/.
Yamada Web Guide babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides/asl.html — A.S.L. fonts, links (including and interactive Braille and A.S.L. Guide).
The University of Lyon's Sign Language Web site bonucci.univ-lyon2.fr/home/lsf-univ-lyonII.html — can be accessed in English, French or Italian; has a multilingual sign database, Cybersign, that displays signs in several different languages for a given word; an on-line dictionary of French Sign language; and a feature that translates an entered word into 5 languages.
Sign Language Dictionary (A.S.L. and International Sign) on-line http://www.handspeak.com/.
American Sign language Browser commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb/index.html.
Articles, links, discussions (on cochlear implants, etc.) deafness.miningco.com/.
B.B.C. weekly magazine programme in British Sign language a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/see_hear/">www.bbc.co.uk/see_hear/.
About American Sign language, legal questions, education, interpretation, etc. www.deafzone.com/.
Finnish Association of the Deaf (all in Finnish) has lots of good links www.kl-deaf.fi/.
Gallaudet University www.gallaudet.edu/. (See also http://www.deafway.org/ about the next world conference).

International organisations:
For U.N. and other documents on the Deaf, see www.igc.apc.org/habitat/rights and www.dpa.org.sg/DPA/ESCAP/logo.htm.
World Federation of the Deaf www.wfdnews.org/home.asp.
European Union of the Deaf www.eudnet.org/.

Extract from "Language and Human Rights", a plenary paper at the Euro-Sign Conference, 6-8 September, 2001, München, Germany, organised by the Deutscher Gehörlosen-Bund.
By Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Roskilde University, Denmark.

5. Arguments to exclude Sign languages from the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
5.1. What are the arguments?
Verena Krausneker quotes, in her M.A. thesis Sign Languages in the Minority Languages Policy of the European Union (1998: 22), a written statement on Sign languages and the European Charter by Mr. Fernando Albanese. He was the Director of Environment and Local Authorities in the Secretariat General of the Council of Europe at the point when the European Charter was being negotiated. Mr. Albanese does
...not think on the basis of the information in my possession that the Charter applies to Sign Languages. In any case, such a problem was never raised during the negotiations of the Charter.
The "information" that Mr. Albanese claims to possess is, in fact, serious misinformation, completely false. He claims that ...the Sign Languages are connected with a handicap and not with the membership to a group, ethnically, religiously or linguistically different from the majority of the population of a state. A "regional or minority language", for the purposes of the Charter, requires that this language be ...different from the official language(s) of the State; it does not include either dialects of the official language(s) of the State or the languages of migrants. (Article 1 (a) ii).

Mr. Albanese uses the following argument to exclude sign languages. He thinks that the essential element required by the definition, namely ...the difference in respect of the official language(s) of the State" is missing, because "IF I understand it correctly, Sign Languages are means of communication within any language. (1998: 22; emphasis added).

We shall next de-construct the arguments. Mr. Albanese claims two things:
1. the Deaf do not fulfil the requirements of being a minority, and 2. sign languages do not fulfill the requirements for being regional or minority languages.

5.2. De-constructing the arguments: are the Deaf a minority?
The Deaf do objectively fulfill most of the criteria for being a minority, regardless of which definition of a minority is used. The problem is that many of the bureaucrats responsible for the interpretation and management of various Charters and Conventions do not seem to know enough about the characteristics of the Deaf communities to be able to assess to what extent the various criteria are fulfilled (see Capotorti 1979, for the difficulty of defining minorities; see also Andrések 1989, Packer 1993). There is no definition of a minority that would be universally accepted in international law, but most definitions are very similar indeed. Most definitions use as defining characteristics a combination of the following:
A. numbers;[i]
B. dominance is used in some but not others ("in an inferior and non-dominant position", Andrések 1989: 60; "in a non-dominant position", Capotorti 1979: 96);
C. ethnic or religious or linguistic traits, features or characteristics, or cultural bonds and ties which are (markedly) different from those of the rest of the population (in most definitions);
D. a will/wish (if only implicit) to safeguard, or preserve, or strengthen the patterns of life and behaviour, or culture, or traditions, or religion, or language of the group is specifically mentioned in most definitions (e.g., Capotorti 1979: 96). Language is included in most but not all definitions (e.g., not in Andrések's definition 1989: 60);
E. citizenship/nationality in the state concerned is required in most definitions in charters and covenants as part of the definition, i.e., minorities are defined so as to give national or regional minorities more rights than to immigrants and refugees (who, by definition, are considered non-national and non-regional). In contrast, academic definitions for research purposes often make no mention of nationality as a criterion. (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 489-490).
As an example of a broad definition, I present my own definition (from Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1994: 107, Note 2; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 491), which is based on my reformulation of the definition by the Council of Europe Commission for Democracy through Law (91) 7, Art. 2: [ii]

A group which is smaller in number than the rest of the population of a State, whose members have ethnic, religious or linguistic features different from those of the rest of the population, and are guided, if only implicitly, by the will to safeguard their culture, traditions, religion or language. Any group coming within the terms of this definition shall be treated as an ethnic, religious or linguistic minority. To belong to a minority shall be a matter of individual choice.
I have, in this definition, omitted the requirement of citizenship ("who are nationals of that State"), because a forced change of citizenship, to my mind, cannot be required in order to be able to enjoy basic human rights. [iii] Besides, most Deaf persons are citizens of the state where they live.

As we can see, the Deaf fulfill all the criteria:
1. they are as a group "smaller in number than the rest of the population of a State"; 2. they "have...linguistic features different from those of the rest of the population"; and 3. they have, through their organizations, shown "the will to safeguard their culture, traditions...or language".
Therefore, the Deaf are a national linguistic minority to whom the European Charter should apply. If an individual claims that she belongs to a national minority, and the State claims that such a national linguistic minority does not exist, there is a conflict, and the State may refuse to grant the minority person or group rights which it has accorded or might accord to national minorities. In many definitions of minority, minority rights thus become conditional on the acceptance by the State of the existence of a minority in the first place. According to my definition (and this part was suggested by Council of Europe itself!), minority status does NOT depend on the acceptance of the State, but is either "objectively" ("coming within the terms of this definition" or subjectively verifiable ("a matter of individual choice"). This interpretation has been confirmed by the U.N. Human Rights Committee in 1994. They re-interpreted Article 27 of the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966, in force since 1976) in a General Comment of 6 April 1994 (U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.5, 1994). Article 27 is still the most far-reaching Article in (binding) human rights law granting linguistic rights:
"In those states in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language".
Until the re-interpretation, the Article was interpreted as:
excluding (im)migrants (who have not been seen as minorities);
excluding groups (even if they are citizens) which are not recognised as minorities by the State;
only conferring some protection against discrimination (= "negative rights") but not a positive right to maintain or even use one's language;
not imposing any obligations on the States.
The U.N. Human Rights Committee sees the Article as:
protecting all individuals on the State's territory or under its jurisdiction (i.e. also immigrants and refugees), irrespective of whether they belong to the minorities specified in the Article or not; stating that the existence of a minority does not depend on a decision by the State but requires to be established by objective criteria; recognizing the existence of a "right";
imposing positive obligations on the States.

For Deaf people this means that various countries minimally have to see the Deaf as a (linguistic) minority, protected by Article 27. Likewise, the re-interpretation means that minorities, including the Deaf, are supposed to have positive language rights, not only the negative right of protection against discrimination. The states where Deaf live, i.e., all states in the world, thus do have positive obligations towards the Deaf as a linguistic minority. In addition, the Deaf can of course also be seen as a group with a handicap, if they so choose, but whether they choose this or not has no consequences for their minority status: they ARE a linguistic minority.

5.3. De-constructing the arguments: are Sign languages minority languages?
A "regional or minority language" for the purposes of the European Charter requires that this language be "different from the official language(s) of the State; it does not include either dialects of the official language(s) of the State or the languages of migrants" (Article 1 (a) ii).
As we remember, Mr. Albanese did not think that Sign languages were different from the official languages because "Sign Languages are means of communication within any language" (Krausneker 1998: 22; emphasis added). In April 2000, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, rejecting the demand by the Danish Association of the Deaf that Sign language be included when Denmark ratifies the Charter, quoted Council of Europe's legal department and argued that Sign Language did not fulfill the criteria for being a minority language; it is a "means of communication" (kommunikationsmiddel) rather than a (historical) language, also because the Danish Deaf use the Danish language in its written form as their written language.
Firstly, Sign languages are completely independent languages and have nothing to do with the official oral languages of the countries where they exist. Mr. Albanese may be thinking of Signed languages or Manual Sign Codes such as Signed Swedish, Signed English, Signed German, etc., but these are NOT Sign languages, only manually coded oral languages. Secondly, ALL languages are "means of communication", even if there are other means of communication, too, such as pictures, dress, jewelry, and so on. Using visual signs rather than oral signs as a means of communication does not make a language less of a language. Thirdly, Sign languages are historical languages in the same way as oral languages are, and some of them may have a longer pedigree than many oral languages. Finally, the Danish Deaf using "the Danish language in its written form as their written language", parallels what practically every Deaf community in the world does, even the ones who have been accorded official minority status by the states they live in. Most Sign languages do not as yet have writing systems that would be easily available for the Deaf. The necessary resources for reducing them to writing have not existed. If languages without (everyday use of) their own writing systems were not seen as languages, some two thirds of the world's oral languages would also disappear, not be seen as languages, because they do not have writing systems, or, if they have them, they have only been used for very few purposes, mostly for translating (parts of) the Bible and writing a few grammars or elementary textbooks but not for everyday communication. Sign languages thus fulfill all the requirements for being minority languages for the purposes of the European Charter.

Verena Krausneker's comment to Helle Skjoldan and me (e-mail, May 2000) when she heard about the Danish argumentation, was "[i]t is shocking to see how one piece of wrong information will be perpetuated and used over and over if it suits the intentions of policy makers. The ones who are in the powerful position to decide over languages, cultures and peoples chances in life often seem to...find arguments to support their interests — and will obviously not hesitate to ignore countless scientific findings and evidence on the nature of sign languages and the irreplaceable position they have in a deaf person's life".

All the arguments excluding Sign languages are thus false and based on complete ignorance of languages in general and Sign languages in particular, as any researcher in the area can testify. Today, important language status planning decisions are based on this type of false information, even in situations where the correct information is easily available and has, in fact, been offered to the decision makers.
This is unethical.

Notes:
(i) It has to be remembered that these definitions are for the purposes of international law, so that it is possible to see which groups are entitled to protection that is granted to minorities. If a group is a majority in terms of numbers but in a dominated position, they may have rights on the basis of other characteristics, e.g., status, class, gender, or the like, but they are not a minority. From a sociological point of view, we may then speak about a minorized majority, i.e., a majority that suffers from a similar type of discrimination that minorities often face.
(ii) This Draft was never accepted by Council of Europe, and the one that replaced it and became the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities does not define minorities.
(iii) This interpretation has since been borne out by the U.N. Human Rights Commission's General Comment on Article 27.

Sound judgment: Does curing deafness really mean cultural genocide?

Columns April, 2002 by Cathy Young (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_11_33/ai_84246679)

EVEN THE LEAST reactionary among us may sometimes agree that the celebration of difference and pluralism has brought modern Western culture to the brink of lunacy. One such occasion was the recent broadcast on public television of a documentary, Sound and Fury, examining the controversy over a technology that can enable a deaf person to gain near-normal hearing: the cochlear implant, a device that is surgically inserted into the inner ear. The controversy is not about how well the implant works or whether it poses health risks; it's about whether such a technology is a boon or a bane for the deaf.

Sound and Fury focuses on the conflicts in one Long Island, New York, family: A deaf couple, Peter and Nita Artinian, refuse to let their 5-year-old daughter, Heather, get an implant--much to the dismay of Peter's hearing parents. "If somebody gave me a pill that would make me hearing, would I take it? No way," Peter Artinian asserts in sign language. "I'd want to go to a hospital and throw it up and go back to being deaf. I want to be deaf....If the technology progresses, maybe it's true deaf people will become extinct, and my heart will be broken. Deaf culture is something to value and cherish. It's my culture." Other deaf people in the film echo his views, praising "deaf culture" and deriding attempts to cure deafness.

Militant "Deaf Pride" activism first gained national visibility in 1988, when six radical students at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the country's only liberal arts university for the deaf, successfully blocked the appointment of a hearing university president by organizing student protests. This movement has consciously modeled itself not only on the civil rights activism of the 1960s but even more directly on the gay pride movement. Just as gay activists sought to remove the stigma of "sickness" from homosexuality, deaf activists have been trying to challenge the view of deafness as a deficiency. They draw an explicit analogy between efforts to restore hearing to the deaf (or to prevent deafness altogether) and efforts to "cure" homosexuality.

The activists also insist that "deaf culture," complete with its own language--American Sign Language, or ASL--is no different from any other ethnic or linguistic culture. The only deaf people who are truly disabled, deaf activist M.J. Bienvenu has been quoted as saying, are those who "learn forced English while being denied sign." In her view, "for the rest of us, it is no more a disability than being Japanese would be." From such a perspective, "fixing" deafness is nothing less than cultural genocide.

Of course, neither the gay nor the ethnic analogy really holds up. Deafness, all the positive thinking notwithstanding, is defined by the absence of a basic faculty. One may define cultural deafness as the ability to sign, but hearing people can and do learn to use sign language.
Gays, arguably, would not be disadvantaged at all were it not for social prejudice and discrimination. The same can hardly be said of the deaf. While linguists now recognize ASL as a legitimate language, it imposes unique and severe limitations on its users. If it's dark, if your hands are busy or full, if the person to whom you're speaking turns away, you are effectively rendered speechless. Surely, too, the inability to hear environmental sounds that may signal danger to oneself or others--an oncoming car, a falling object, a baby's cry--is a real impairment. Notably, while deaf activists insist on redefining deafness as difference rather than disability, they are in no hurry to give up disability-based legal protections and government funding.
Perhaps it's not surprising that some deaf people would try to come to terms with their condition by insisting that they are so happy being the way they are that they would never want to be any other way. (In Sound and Fury, Peter Artinian rhapsodizes about how "peaceful" it is to live in a world of total silence.) What is shocking is that in recent years this defense mechanism frequently has been treated as a serious argument. Sound and Fury, which approaches the controversy over cochlear implants and the preservation of "deaf culture" as a debate in which each side has valid points and merits balanced treatment, is only the latest example.

Thus, Northeastern University psychologist Harlan Lane, a prominent (hearing) champion of "deaf culture" who asserts that to define deaf people as hearing-impaired is like defining women as "non-men," has received a MacArthur fellowship and rave reviews for his work. At the end of a 1994 essay in The New York Times Magazine, Andrew Solomon made this astounding statement: "Perhaps, like the search for a cure to gayness, the search for a cure for the deaf will be dropped by respectable institutions--which would be both a bad and a good thing."
When such ideas gain currency among intellectual elites, one appreciates the value of the sturdy common sense so treasured by populists-the kind that would react to all this rhetoric with an incredulous, "This is nuts!" Deaf activists dismiss such an attitude as the arrogance of the hearing, who cannot imagine that there could be anything positive about being deaf.
But quite a few deaf people see these activists as an arrogant minority trying to impose its will on everyone else. It is worth noting that only about a quarter of the estimated 2 million profoundly deaf people in the United States use sign language.

Nevertheless, the fringe ideas of Deaf Pride have had consequences. At many schools for the deaf in recent decades, ASL has been dogmatically treated as the only acceptable form of communication, and children with some hearing have received little if any training in auditory and speaking skills. Deaf schools that promote "oralism" have been targeted for protests and picketing. Heather White-stone, the deaf woman who was crowned Miss America in 1995, was denounced by some militants because she speaks--making her, in their eyes, unsuitable to represent the deaf.

The increasing popularity of cochlear implants, available since 1985 and approved for use in children in 1990, has added urgency to the issue. About 4,000 Americans now receive the implant every year, and the numbers are rising steadily, particularly among young children in their primary speech-learning years: From 1995 to 2000, the annual number of implantations performed in children under 3 grew sevenfold. Deaf activists, meanwhile, have railed against the procedure, comparing it to Nazi medical experiments. Tensions have run so high that some parents have allowed their children to be interviewed for articles on cochlear implant success stories only on the condition that they not be identified.

In the past couple of years, there have been some signs of detente on the issue, thanks in part to vast improvements in cochlear implant technology. In the fall of 2000 the National Association for the Deaf backed away from its adamantly anti-implant stance to embrace a variety of choices and attitudes on the issue. Still, the controversy is far from over. In Sound and Fury, Peter Artinian's father tells him, "If I didn't know you, I would say that you are an abusive parent because you are preventing a cure for deafness." The bizarre scenario of parents refusing to let their children have such a cure for ideological reasons raises the question of whether the state's duty to protect the rights of children should override parental autonomy. As in the cases of parents who deny their children medical treatment in the name of religious faith, there are no simple answers here.

But aside from the question of what the government should do, there is no reason for the news media and other cultural institutions to be deferential toward crackpot beliefs that come with the cachet of "diversity." Perhaps the best way to learn something from the Deaf Pride movement is to see it as a reductio ad absurdum of modern identity politics.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young (cathyyoung2@cs.com) writes a column for The Boston Globe.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Reason FoundationCOPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

Making money over deafness

Teachers of deaf children dont make money but in other hand, Cochlear Implant companies do! I have seen it myself here in my city. The auditory/oral preschool recently established (will start their first class this fall, 2007) is established thank to one Cochlear Implant foundation name Oberkotter Foundation. Oberkotter Foundation GAVE the university $3.5 million to set up preschool for next 3 to 5 years with new degree for SLP (Speech Language Pathology) to be able to TEACH deaf children auditory/oral approach, discouraged, or should I say ban, sign language to be used in classroom. They are attached to already established BI-BI Deaf Education Program and called it a new version of deaf education!

Trust me, professors at Bi-Bi Deaf Education program and those in Communication Disorder (COMD) Department who support sign language (not many) fought a hell fight with new committee in COMD but they couldnt win as they did five years ago. Those professors couldnt confront the new committee because the new committee prevented them from talk to them or involve with their meetings or minutes.

So its up to parents of our city to fight but we are small, only 14 parents from 60 miles radius, mostly rural areas. I use "parent" rights to fight this as I am also parent so now I am using this to my advantage to fight and extend the power to deaf community as more people involved, the better, more powerful and stronger the effort will be.

Preschool doesnt and will not make money but they got money from those who make money from deaf children. If the foundation didnt involved then there will be no preschool established in my city.

You might wonder what university and city this happened. There are over 50 typical preschool all over the United States and the newest is in Logan, Utah with assistance from Utah State University, in fact the preschool are housed IN the campus.

Utah State University is known for one of the best Bi-Bi program in the country with Dr. Freeman King as head of the Deaf Education. Dr. Freeman King graduated from Deaf Education Program in Lamar University in east Texas and associated with Dr. Angel Ramos, Dr. Sam Silke, Dr. John Luakner, Dr. Tony Martin, and many others well known figures in Deaf Education.

Maybe you should look around to get idea of what is actually going on out there; you might be surprised!